About

Lee McGuigan is an assistant professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. He studies the history and political economy of advertising, media, and information technology. McGuigan's ongoing work examines knowledge infrastructures and logistical processes in advertising and media industries. His book, "Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech," published in 2023 by the MIT Press, explores how efforts to predict and influence consumer habits, package, and sell audience attention have contributed to currents in surveillance, data processing, and behavioral sciences. His scholarship has appeared in various books and journals, including Big Data & Society, New Media & Society, the Journal of Law and Political Economy, and others. He is also co-editor of "The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age," published in 2014 by Peter Lang.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Computer Security
• Marketing
• Business
• Law
• World Wide Web
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Internet privacy
• Advertising
• Human–computer interaction
• Management

Selected publications

• Market-Oriented Disinformation Research: Digital Advertising, Disinformation, and Fake News on Social Media

  Journal of Cultural Economy · 2026-05-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Direct marketization: Platform surveillance and the contextual integrity of democratic media

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay uses the theory of privacy as contextual integrity together with critical research on the role of media in democracies to critique platform surveillance and a related process that I call direct marketization. It focuses on the case of advertising attribution, a paradigm of audience and marketing measurement that attempts to determine advertising effectiveness by observing people as both media audiences and marketplace consumers. Advertising platforms have recently promised to implement ‘privacy-preserving’ methods of attribution measurement. The paper argues that these efforts to legitimize attribution make implicit claims about the values and purposes of media systems. It then introduces the concept of direct marketization to explain how these claims relate to shifts in the social and institutional norms of ad-supported media. The analysis exposes direct marketization and advertising attribution, which both fuel and depend on platform surveillance, as contradictory to the contextual integrity of democratic media.

  PublisherDOI

• Political Economy of Advertising

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication · 2025-06-16

  reference-entrySenior author

  Advertising is an institution in modern societies. It is integral to the political economy of capitalism and the political economy of communications media, and it is itself an industry with an internal political economy or power structure. In the United States, advertising has been a keystone of business strategy and oligopolistic competition since the Industrial Revolution. A modern advertising industry emerged as large manufacturers of branded commodities sought to stimulate sufficient consumer demand to match the output capacity of mass production and to surround their products with cultural meanings that would help them stand out from the virtually identical products made by competitors. The advertising professionals who served the needs of large advertisers organized themselves into agencies, which became large corporations and, eventually, global conglomerates. Advertisers and their agencies insinuated themselves into the power structures of mass media, from print publishing, to broadcasting and electronic media, to the ubiquitous surround of mobile, Internet-enabled devices. Advertising money has subsidized the production of news and many of the most popular forms of entertainment and social media, creating relationships whereby journalists, software developers, and other cultural producers are dependent upon advertisers and advertising intermediaries. Advertising priorities—such as the desire to access the attention of consumers seen as valuable and ignore those who are not—shape the content of news and entertainment and the organization of digital platforms (including social media and search engines) and mobile applications. These priorities have proved contradictory to the public-service priorities of journalism and to the financial stability of news production. The ongoing journalism crisis, whereby more and more people have diminishing access to high-quality local news, represents a form of market failure that has been enabled by public policy choices favoring the commercial goals of advertisers and media capitalists. The ad industry itself produces and circulates stories about products, consumers, and life in capitalist societies. It also generates and uses information to guide and narrate its own internal processes; advertising professionals are constantly seeking information to help them efficiently target and influence consumers, justify strategic decisions, and sell their supposed powers of influence. Political economy approaches to research and analysis illuminate the power dynamics across advertising’s roles within capitalism, within media industries, and within the advertising industry itself.

  PublisherDOI

• Direct marketization: Platform surveillance and the contextual integrity of democratic media

  Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies · 2025-04-17 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay uses the theory of privacy as contextual integrity together with critical research on the role of media in democracies to critique platform surveillance and a related process that I call direct marketization. It focuses on the case of advertising attribution, a paradigm of audience and marketing measurement that attempts to determine advertising effectiveness by observing people as both media audiences and marketplace consumers. Advertising platforms have recently promised to implement ‘privacy-preserving’ methods of attribution measurement. The paper argues that these efforts to legitimize attribution make implicit claims about the values and purposes of media systems. It then introduces the concept of direct marketization to explain how these claims relate to shifts in the social and institutional norms of ad-supported media. The analysis exposes direct marketization and advertising attribution, which both fuel and depend on platform surveillance, as contradictory to the contextual integrity of democratic media.

  PublisherDOI

• Grotesque Prosperity: Liver King’s Hypermasculine Influencer Grift

  Television & New Media · 2025-08-21

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Liver King is a hypermasculine wellness influencer who credits his primal lifestyle and raw meat diet for helping him achieve extraordinary physical strength and prosperity. This essay reads Liver King’s promotional spectacle through and against critical literature on social media influencers. We find similarities and differences between his performances and those by which influencers typically pursue visibility and authenticity. In particular, we discuss Liver King’s embodied personification of neoliberal entrepreneurialism, his grotesque aesthetics, and his relation to professional wrestling’s styles of character development. The essay highlights Liver King’s affinities with the online manosphere, reality television, and alternative health marketers, and it considers how a close look at his over-exaggerated style of personal branding and optimization can yield insights for the broader study of influencers and neoliberalism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• ‘Cookie-less’ identification for/against privacy?

  Internet Policy Review · 2025-08-06

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The online advertising industry is shifting content monetisation mechanisms to rely on first-party user identification architectures. The paper evaluates these architectures based on a novel typology to assess their privacy implications.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Author Meets Critics: Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech

  Advertising & Society Quarterly · 2024-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: Lee McGuigan, author of Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech (MIT Press, 2023), meets with a group of scholars to discuss how his book provides a history of the origins and development of adtech, which has regularly involved the tension between entertaining consumers and focusing on direct selling. The first part of the discussion covers the origins of adtech and the calculative evolution, adtech’s connections to military optimization techniques, ethical concerns surrounding privacy and discrimination, and the industry’s reliance on surveillance technologies. The group also delves into the implications of adtech as a form of control, shaping consumer behavior and societal norms. They reflect on the precariousness of the industry, the gap between marketing hype and practical realities, the potential for public service media systems, the impact of generative AI, and the need for critical perspectives on adtech’s role in society. The panel agrees that McGuigan’s book provides a critical perspective on the political economy of capitalism and the complex dynamics of advertising, media, and technology. Moreover, some participants challenge the notion that advertising is a necessary subsidy for democratic communication, which supports a shift towards public service media systems that prioritize public culture over private value.

  PublisherDOI

• Managed Sovereigns: How Inconsistent Accounts of the Human Rationalize Platform Advertising

  Journal of Law and Political Economy · 2023-05-20 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Platform business models rest on an uneven foundation. Online behavioral advertising drives revenue for companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon, with privacy self-management governing the flows of personal data that help platforms dominate advertising markets. We argue that this area of platform capitalism is reinforced through a process whereby seemingly incompatible conceptions of human subjects are codified and enacted in law and industrial art. A rational liberal “consumer” agrees to the terms of data extraction and exploitation set by platforms. Inside the platform, however, algorithmic systems act upon a “user,” operationalized as fragmentary patterns, propensities, probabilities, and potential profits. Transitioning from consumers into users, individuals pass through a suite of legal and socio-technical regimes that each orient market formations around particular accounts of human rationality. This article shows how these accounts are highly productive for platform businesses, configuring subjects within a legitimizing framework of consumer sovereignty and market efficiency.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Managed Sovereigns: How Inconsistent Accounts of the Human Rationalize Platform Advertising

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Model Consumers

  2023-01-25 · 9 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Advertising and media industries actively construct populations as audiences and market segments. This chapter looks at these constructions through two lenses: (1) the formal, mathematical modeling of consumer behavior and (2) the racial theories and normative cultural models that say how “good” consumer-citizens are supposed to act particularly in relation to stereotypes and multicultural marketing. Using the theoretical and methodological tools of political economy, we position advertising as an institution of knowledge production and social sorting and connect its recent developments in data-driven, discriminatory advertising to historical influences from the management sciences in the mid-twentieth century.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jake Goldenfein

  5 shared

• Ido Sivan‐Sevilla

  3 shared

• Vincent Manzerolle

  3 shared

• Patrick Parham

  University of Maryland, College Park

  3 shared

• Sarah Myers West

  2 shared

• Anthony Nadler

  2 shared

• Marcel Rosa‐Salas

  2 shared

• Salomé Viljoen

  Harvard University Press

  2 shared