Advertising as device and bio-machinic event

In popular culture as well as in the imagination of many industry practitioners, the future of advertising will closely resemble the ‘Minority Report’ model: Embedded in a sensing environment, consumers will be delivered personalized commercials based on biometric and behavioral data. Advertising is thus still conceptualized in a rather ‘traditional’ sense – as a text, conceived by advertisers, informed by data, and delivered via media devices. This presentation however will draw on a number of case studies to illustrate an alternative scenario. In this scenario devices are no longer infrastructural elements for the delivery of advertising, but devices are the advertising. This view challenges established notions of what advertising is and the work it is supposed to do. Rather than being a ‘text’, advertising needs to be understood (and critiqued) as a biomachinic assemblage, transmitting, generating and modulating affective presence. Similarly, the role of advertisers as cultural intermediaries needs to be re-considered by taking into account their role in shifting networks of human and non-human actors.