Plataformização da publicidade: agenciamentos e imaginários no trabalho de gestão de tráfego pago na plataforma Meta Ads

Abstract

The platformization of the web has produced a reconfiguration of advertising, which quickly became digital and began to generate significant repercussions for the organization of work within the field. In the context of big tech companies, advertising has ceased to function solely as a means of promoting consumption and has also become a central product of platform capitalism, as it constitutes the main sources of revenue for these corporations. In this scenario, advertising on digital platforms through sponsored ads has come to demand new functions within the advertising field. This process has led to the emergence of paid traffic managers, professionals responsible for the programming, optimization, and management of these advertisements, as well as to reconfigurations in the knowledge, demands, and roles of these workers and of advertising agencies themselves. Within this context, this research aims to analyze how the platformization of advertising, materialized in the operations of Meta/Facebook, shapes professional practices, rationalities, and forms of work organization in the advertising field, based on an examination of paid traffic management on the Meta Ads platform. The study also seeks to understand the forms of agency and imaginaries constructed by paid traffic workers in relation to Meta’s governance, as well as the reconfigurations triggered within the advertising field more broadly. Considering digital platforms as spaces marked by the opacity of information regarding their functioning, the research adopts a technographic approach (Bucher, 2018), drawing on the analysis of the Meta Ads platform, Meta’s institutional website, and the Meta Blueprint professional training and certification platform. In parallel, in-depth interviews (Gil, 2008; Bauer & Gaskell, 2002) were conducted with eight paid traffic professionals. The study therefore adopts a qualitative approach. As a result, it proposes a map of Meta’s advertising infrastructure, which demonstrates how the platformization of advertising operated by the corporation reconfigures the dynamics and relationships among the different agents in the advertising field. The findings further indicate that, despite the infrastructural power exercised by Meta, forms of agency, negotiation, and everyday tactics mobilized by professionals persist in their work.