Two sides of the digital advertising coin: putting hypernudging into perspective

Abstract

Digital advertising markets have evolved into a complex system with multiple interdependent actors interacting across the supply and demand chains. Google has emerged as a systemic actor in the digital advertising ecosystem. The company’s presence within each layer of the digital advertising value chain, combined with the opacity and complexity of the market mechanisms, creates dependency challenges for business users. Google is also a choice architect that shapes users’ experiences on its platform’s business domains, including the experiences of the ads they are exposed to. Therefore, the company is uniquely positioned to hypernudge users towards specific market outcomes; it has the ability to steer within markets whilst following its economic imperatives. Positioning digital advertising by Google within the hypernudging framework provides a new lens for studying its potential for influencing digital advertising market dynamics and individual users. Hypernudging refers to one of the most sophisticated data-driven nudging processes that allow for dynamically personalised user steering, where (when executed perfectly) the right user is reached with the right message, by the right means, at the right time, as many times as needed. By examining local search advertising on Google Maps and multi-channel integrated advertising campaigns, this article shows that both could constitute a form of hypernudging