The Mobile Observation of Advertising Toolkit: A Tool for Understanding Ephemeral and Sequenced Social Media Data

We introduce the Mobile Observation of Advertising Toolkit (MOAT), a mobile screen recording tool designed to enhance platform observability by capturing mobile advertising data from modern Android devices. Standard social media data collection methods often focus on the production side of platforms, examining content creation, distribution, and algorithmic outputs, rather than the consumption side, where users encounter sequenced, ephemeral, and context-dependent experiences that are difficult to capture through conventional means. Expanding on Krieter’s (2019) initial mobile data recording concept, our toolkit collects mobile advertising experiences in a privacy-sensitive manner, allowing researchers to analyse mobile advertising in platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and more. The toolkit’s broad adaptability suggests wide applicability to various contexts beyond advertising, highlighting a crucial development in the collection and analysis of mobile platform data.