Almost as soon as advertising agencies invested in computerization, some firms recognized the potential for networked data communications between media buyers and sellers. Leo Burnett began using IBM machines in December of 1960, and two years later Advertising Age reported
244 “There’s No Business Like Computer Business,” 50.
245 “SOS Accepted By Most Reps,” Broadcasting, February 5, 1968, 25.
246 Michel Callon and Fabian Muniesa, “Peripheral Vision: Economic Markets as Calculative Collection Devices,” Organization Studies 26, no. 8 (August 2005): 1229-1250.
that “Burnett sees the day when leased lines will be used for simultaneous input and output of information between agencies and clients.”247 An executive from the agency mused in 1963, “I think it’s very reasonable to assume that the rep and the agency will directly tie-in into one another’s installations” in order to immediately access information about availabilities.248 By “linking” computer systems, he argued, the industry could automate “as much as possible the entire TV spot ordering, buying, billing, paying, reporting operations.”249
Before the end of the decade some of the largest agencies had established direct data communication with rep firms via dedicated phone lines. The director of media and research at one agency explained how this altered daily routines: “Each evening the agency computer queries the reps’ computers for the latest availabilities in a given set of markets. Then, by tapes of ARB or Nielsen data, the agency computer can complete the rating and cost-per-thousand information the buyer requires. Each night a print-out is prepared and placed on the buyer’s desk for immediate action the next morning.” Compared with the chains of interactions previously required to obtain this information, he claimed, “this method employing computers is virtually instantaneous.”250
Some commentators were careful not to get too swept up in futurism. Even strong proponents admitted that an “imaginary miracle machine” capable of automating the entire process of media buying was “not yet on the horizon” in the mid-1960s.251Broadcasting observed in 1966, “The histories of companies born to supply the station-rep-agency triangle with automated central billing are replete with disappointments or, more to the point, failures.”252 Still, in spite of doubts, sober skepticism, and anxieties about human replacement, many observers
247 Heady, “Computers Bring New Dimension to Ad Field,” 89. 248 “Agencies Praise H-R Move,” 46.
249 “Lavin Says TV Rates are High,” Broadcasting, November 25, 1963, 57. 250 Ochs, “Computer Technology,” 20.
251 “A World of Computers Plugged in by Humans,” 30
looked forward to a future in which more of media planning and buying would be handled entirely by programmed machines.
For example, Dan O’Neill, president of the Advertising Data Processing Association and a researcher at McCann-Erickson, was one of what Broadcasting called “a growing school of media men who are trying to turn mechanical media selection into a more reliable science.” O’Neill predicted that “the mechanical revolution” would result in “fewer and larger rep houses in the future, all eventually working on an integrated real-time computerized system.” The “ultimate in computerized inventory control” imagined by others like O’Neill was “an on-line representation system [in which] all sales offices and stations would be connected by wire to a central computer, feeding sales information as quickly as it becomes known.” Foreshadowing much later developments in self-service dashboards and trading-desk software, the president at H- R expected that by the early 1970s such a system would allow a salesman to “punch a keyboard at his desk with availability requirements and get an immediate visual response from the computer on a TV monitor.”253 Looking back on rep firms’ computer plans, Broadcasting reflected, “in general they tended to envision the machines as providing virtually instantaneous links to stations and agencies and serving as storehouses for avails that they rep could sell faster, in more quantity that ever before.”254 Discussing a similar “console” spot buying system that his agency would implement over the next few years, a vice president at Benton & Bowles looked forward from 1967: “The computer will give the agency media buyer instant access to spot availabilities in every market. With a simple desk console he will be able to check availabilities and buy spots— without ever using a pencil or picking up a phone.” By 1972, he expected, “the entire spot-buying
253 “For Reps Computers are the Rainbow’s End,” 50-51.
process—all the way from order, to conformation, to bill, to final payment—will be computerized.”255
At a 1973 workshop convened by the ANA, participants continued to hope that computers could be used to create “a kind of stock-market approach” to buying spot TV.256 Within a few months Broadcasting reported that the two leading providers of “on-line computerized information systems” to the commercial television industry had undertaken construction of a “three-way computer tie-in linking stations, ad agencies and rep firms.” Data Communications Corp. operated an on-line system for 67 radio and television stations, and Donovan Data Systems provided a comparable service to 14 of the top 20 ad agencies in the U.S. With the top three rep firms committed to participating, Broadcasting called it “the first step in an ‘industry-wide common use of computers’ to handle national- and local-spot accounting ‘from the point of buy right through to the final payment of the invoice.’”257 By January of 1976, the Katz Agency, which was not in that group, claimed to be “the first independent station rep to operate [an] on-line availability-retrieval system,” which linked 12 sales offices to its New York computer facility.258
In many ways, these were primitive attempts to establish the ad exchanges that interconnect supply- and demand-side platforms in the digital advertising ecosystem. The facility for speculating, or even confidently envisioning, a programmatic future should signal to us that even if the technical ability was still off in the distance, the desire and demand for information technologies that could manage more data at greater speeds and with mathematical precision existed at the dawn of the computer age. Generating, processing, and coordinating flows of information and commerce was, even then, the bedrock of audience manufacture, and in early
255 “What Will Television be Like in ’72,” Broadcasting, November 30, 1967, 39, 42. 256 “ANA Session Spotlights Broadcast Buying,” Broadcasting, December 10, 1973, 39. 257 “Digital Deal,” Broadcasting, April 15, 1974: 65.
efforts to cope with mounting administrative pressures we glimpse the underlying dynamics that have continued to motivate developments toward automated and data-driven advertising. A media executive from Benton & Bowles testified succinctly to this point in describing his agency’s “on- line computer system” in 1970: “The system has been built for the specific purpose of enabling us to handle more efficiently spot TV’s complexities.”259
But as computing resources were appropriated to service existing demands, the expectations of what was possible changed. No doubt interested to see expanded use of his company’s products, a representative from RCA urged advertisers, agencies, and reps to take “initiative” in testing the computer’s capabilities. Suggesting that they dream up exotic questions to ask the new machines, he said, “computers can provide more answers than we have intelligent inquiries.”260 The implication, born out as researchers attempted more sophisticated forms of statistical inference, is that new technologies allowed for new ways of seeing, knowing, and managing the world. Practical consequences of this were experienced at the organizational level, as agencies such as Campbell-Ewald reoriented office spaces, shuffled personnel, and adjusted routines and responsibilities within and across corporate departments so as to “tie in with the hot computer system.”261 Executives at Needham, Harper & Steers noted similarly “the unlimited potentials of the computer for media research and planning.” The agency’s president declared the value of the computer to be constrained “only by the imagination of the people who plan its use.”262 Before concluding this chapter, we consider these people and how others reacted to their arrival.
259 Simko, “The Problem of Surviving in the Paperwork Jungle,” 18. 260 “A World of Computers Plugged in by Humans,” 32.
261 “New Setup at Campbell-Ewald,” Broadcasting, September 6, 1965, 44. Emphasis added. 262 “RCA Computer Starts Automation at NH&S,” Broadcasting, May 16, 1966, 40.