The Emergence of Data-based Ecosystems: The Case of Programmatic Advertising

Platform-based ecosystems have recently attracted considerable scholarly attention. This research aims to understand the extent to which big data contributes to the emergence of specific types of ecosystem. Our empirical setting is programmatic advertising, a large scale distributed platform ecosystem based on the real-time automated method of buying and selling advertisements. We focus on identifying the processes of ecosystem emergence. Our initial evidence suggests that technological and organizational protocols and the highly-standardized language sustaining real-time bidding play an important role in shaping ecosystem emergence and configuration. As we continue to analyse this case, we aim to investigate the set of focal firms strategic responses, and assess the extent to which using and creating big data offers distinct modes of value creation than non-big-data business models.