Improving the Observability of Platform-Based Advertising: How the Australian Ad Observatory Helps Examine and Address(?) the Healthiness of Digital Advertising

The advertising ecosystem has been progressively reshaped by computational advertising models facilitated and controlled by digital media platforms. Platform advertising operated by dominant players Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google) have been heavily criticised for using data generated by users on and off the platforms to heavily promote and target advertising for harmful and unhealthy products to vulnerable consumers. However the operations and impacts of these systems remain opaque and difficult to observe. The Australian Ad Observatory responds to this challenge by creating a methodological framework and research infrastructure integrating cultural, legal, media, and computational perspectives to enable the observation of computational advertising. This methodology comprises three novel computational methods: direct data gathering from ad transparency libraries; automated data donation via participatory citizen science browser plug-ins; and a privacy-aware mobile screen capture app. In this talk Prof Parker will describe how the Australian Ad Observatory works to enable scalable and participant-situated research, overcoming limitations posed by restricted platform access to computational advertising data. Prof Parker will then go on to demonstrate the potential for these methods to inform practice and policy with a brief discussion of the Ad Obsveratory's work on gambling, alcohol, greenwashing and scam research and a deep dive into the examination of unhealthy food advertisements enabled by the Australian Ad Observatory.