The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

by Tim Wu

One board in Florida cut a deal to put the McDonald’s logo on its report cards (good grades qualified you for a free Happy Meal).

In recent years, many have installed large screens in their hallways that pair school announcements with commercials.

William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.

New York City’s leading newspaper was The Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, a fourpage daily with circulation of just 2,600 in a city of almost 300,000.

For the paper’s first issue, he took the unusual step of filling it with advertisements from businesses he had never solicited.

“The object of this paper,” he wrote, “is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY, and at the same time afford an advantageous medium for advertising.”

This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention, the kind we direct with intent.

The depiction of the moon, and one with life on it (not just life, but unicorns and flying man-bats with insistent libidos), was, apparently, widely accepted, in part thanks to the scientific style of the correspondent, the pretense that the story was reprinted from a respectable Edinburgh journal, and the impossibility of replicating with the naked eye the findings of the world’s largest telescope.

Benjamin Day had invented “fake news” and demonstrated its appeal. When the dust settled, the New York Sun, founded just two years prior, had driven its circulation to a very precise-sounding 19,360, sailing past not only the other New York dailies but even the London dailies founded decades earlier, to take its place as the most widely read newspaper in the world.

For despite being static, the Parisian posters evoked a sense of frantic energy in their bright, contrasting colors, and beautiful, half-dressed women—elements that made them nearly impossible to ignore. There were always, of course, arresting sights to behold in art and nature. But the posters were commercial and scalable. “A master of blazing modernities,” as one critic called him, Chéret could print thousands of them, producing their mesmeric effects on millions of passersby. As such, his posters are the second milestone in the industrialized

All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full bore. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom.

We ignore so much stuff for a simple reason: if we didn’t, we’d quickly be overwhelmed, our brains flooded until they seized up.

But our capacity to ignore is limited by another fact: we are always paying attention to something.

But there is more to the posters’ allure. Significantly, they catch the viewer on his way somewhere, the “in between” moments of the day that are in the interstices of our more purposeful mental engagements. That is, times when one might be bored, waiting for a streetcar, or simply strolling around, looking for something to catch the eye. The attentional habit of gazing at the world with nothing better to do has doubtless been a human practice since the species emerged.

the flashing signs employed by vendors, those bouncing icons on your computer screen, the little pictures of cats or sexy women attached to Internet links. All of these stimuli set off neural responses that cause us to engage, whether we mean to or not.

Industries, unlike organisms, have no organic limits on their own growth; they are constantly in search of new markets, or of new ways to exploit old ones more effectively; as Karl Marx unsympathetically observed, they “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”

In Paris the same aesthetic objections were made: critics said that the advertising poster was destroying her reputation as the world’s most beautiful city. Groups including the Society for the Protection of the Landscape and Aesthetics of France, and Les Amis de Paris (Friends of Paris), gained followings by declaring war on the “ugly poster.”

Let us pause here to remark a major recurrent dynamic that has shaped the course of attention industries: “the revolt.”

Our ability to ignore things is adaptive; with enough exposure it can make us indifferent to any stimulus, until, say, a poster that was once arresting becomes one we can see through as if it did not exist. It

If Hopkins had remained true to this vocation, our story would be different. But in his late teens he began to have a crisis of faith and came to “consider the harmless joys of life which had been barred to me.” He made up his mind to quit the ministry, preaching to his congregation of nearly eight hundred one last sermon, a heretical jeremiad “against hell fire, against infant damnation, against the discipline I knew. It even questioned the story of the creation and of Jonah and the whale.” The congregants left in stunned silence, and the next day his mother disowned him. Hopkins was now irrevocably an outsider, a status that he seemed to relish for reasons perhaps only he knew.

Dramatic character arc:D

Hopkins was hired as a “scheme man” for a company selling carpet sweepers, as writers of early advertisements were known long before copywriting acquired the glamour of a David Ogilvy or Don Draper.

This is not to say that there were no regular claimants on human attention, only that commercial and political ones hadn’t yet arrived. When they did, however, they were met by one that had stood for centuries. With its combination of moral injunctions as well as daily and weekly rituals, organized religion had long taken human attention as its essential substrate.

This is especially true of monotheisms, whose demands for a strict adherence to the one true God naturally promote an ideal of undivided attention.

Sagwa,” that were sold through advertising and traveling shows and promised quick cures for nearly any ailment. Yet patent medicine’s most important influence was not on medicine but on advertising. As the industry grew, its pressing advertising needs drew many of the nation’s most creative and talented copywriters, who would come up with some of modern advertising’s most important techniques. It was also through the sale of patent medicine that advertising first proved conclusively its real utility, as a kind of alchemy, an apparently magical means of transforming basically useless substances into commercial gold.

To create a national campaign for the small regional brand, Hopkins took inspiration from the success of two former peddlers, Aaron Montgomery Ward and Richard Sears, whose mail-order catalogues (Montgomery Ward’s and Sears’s) built a thriving business on the back of a federally subsidized carrier. Thus did the U.S. Post Office first become a platform for commercial harvesting of attention.

Hopkins began to post more than 400,000 pamphlets for Dr. Shoop’s every day, reaching millions with this pioneering effort at “direct mail” advertising, or what we now call “spam.”

In another stroke of genius, Hopkins pioneered the idea of a free sample. “Do as millions have done—stop doubting—give Liquozone a test.”13 The average consumer who did so would go on

to spend 91 cents on the medicine before realizing its uselessness.

Such was Hopkins’s genius, however, that his work now began riding the growing backlash like a riptide: his product would be advertised as the anti–snake oil.

1904, Hopkins and Smith saw revenues of $100 million (in current dollars), having sent out five million free samples.

“muckraker.”

In addition, the press had long displayed little interest in offending an industry that was perhaps its greatest single source of advertising revenue.

new muckraking magazines,

These new laws, along with advances in legitimate medicine, marked the beginning of the collapse of the patent medicine industry.

Thus did Snake Oil go from being a cure-all to a byword for fraud.

In fact, the very word “propaganda” originally had a strictly ecclesiastical meaning of propagating the faith.

Mark Crispin Miller writes, “It was not until 1915 that governments first systematically deployed the entire range of modern media to rouse their population to fanatical assent.” The entry of the State into the game—with its vast resources and monopoly on force—would be spectacularly consequential.

The campaign’s most useful tool turned out to be a French invention we have seen before, the giant illustrated advertisement.

Seeing the necessity to keep innovating, the government did have a few more inspired ideas. For example, it built a small fleet of specialized “cine-motor vans,” which were equipped to screen films conducive to enlistment on large walls around the country—the drive-in movie was thus born not of romance but existential threat.

at 9 p.m. sharp at more than four thousand cinemas, music halls, and theaters. By such means—at a time when “broadcast” still referred to a crop sowing technique—the prime minister reached an estimated 2.5 million people at once, an unheard of audience at the time.14

As the historians M. L. Sanders and Philip Taylor wrote, “The British Government was responsible for opening a Pandoran box which unleashed the weapon of propaganda upon the modern world.”

In the burgeoning battle for human attention, Creel’s approach was the equivalent of carpet-bombing.

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