Editor’s Note:
“Speaker’s Box” invites academics and practitioners to identify potential areas of research affecting marketing and advertising. Its intention is to bridge the gap between the length of time it takes to produce rigorous work and the acceleration of change within practice. With this contribution, John Deighton shows how data technology sits within its industry, which he defines as the “commercial Internet.” He depicts this industry as a supply chain and shows how a small number of firms have defied the chain metaphor to integrate all the way from data source to data application. These integrators, he argues, are...