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

by Tim Wu

Beginning with radio, each new medium would attain its commercial viability through the resale of what attention it could capture in exchange for its “free” content.

What Day understood—more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him—was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product.

the earliest newspapers “treated advertising as a form of news…presumably because it was considered interesting to readers.”

Some of the graffiti covering the walls of Pompeii, preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius, turn out to be advertisements for erotic services.

the Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.

Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game.

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.

For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it.

kings and queens once depended on the mystique of inaccessibility as an expression of power.

Before the democratic age, only the Church, as discussed, systematically sought and used access to the mind of the people. In fact, the very word “propaganda” originally had a strictly ecclesiastical meaning of propagating the faith. As Mark Crispin Miller writes, “It was not until 1915

“The British Government was responsible for opening a Pandoran box which unleashed the weapon of propaganda upon the modern world.”

Long before Americans began borrowing British television shows, they were borrowing propaganda techniques. However, like nearly every American imitation of a British original, the American version would be much bigger.

it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.

The built environment created by advertising began to seem like a natural ecosystem; the incessant barrage of commercial propositions became a fact of life.

“The happiest are those who live closest to nature, an essential to advertising success.”

“Advertising has gone amuck,” he wrote, “in that it has mistaken the surface silliness for the sane solid substance of an averagely decent human nature.”

For the advertisers, by far the most valuable function of advertising, then, is the shaping or creation of demands that would not otherwise exist.

True brand advertising is therefore an effort not so much to persuade as to convert. At its most successful, it creates a product cult, whose loyalists cannot be influenced by mere information: companies like Apple, Hermès, and Porsche are among those that have achieved this kind of immunity to competition, at least among their true believers. What is offered to adherents is not merely a good product (though often it is), but something deeper and more deeply fulfilling—a sense of meaning that comes with the surrender of choice.

When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it.

Prime time was (and to a lesser degree remains) a massive ritual of collective attention, a force drawing people together.

“The difference between an ad man and a behavioral scientist became only a matter of degree.”

what he felt had befallen television over the decade. Its deep embrace of advertising had resulted in a kind of self-imposed (and sometimes sponsor-imposed) censorship: anything too downbeat, dark, or challenging was being systematically suppressed, for fear of contradicting the upbeat and optimistic commercial messages of television’s sponsors.

while television is supposed to be “free,” it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandizing.

The Pepsi difference was to suggest that consuming the product somehow made you into what you wanted to be.

Here was consumption coaxed with an anti-consumerist ethos; it was Pepsi selling the counterculture to mainstream America,

the essence of the spirit of liberation: for most people it was not an end of desire (as in some Buddhist sense), or a wish for solitary withdrawal (in a monastic sense), or even, as Leary had hoped, a spiritual longing equal to motivating an inward turn. Rather, after decades of relative conformity and one of ultimate conformity, what had been uncorked was powerful individual desires and the will to express them. Above all, most simply wanted to feel more like an individual. And that was a desire industry could cater to, just like any other.

A Charlie Brown Christmas proved once again the counterintuitive truth that anti-commercialism could yield great commercial success;

“we are terribly aware of the current sounds and fears and smells and attitudes. We are the agency of today.”

“Obviously, pink shirts are more creative than white shirts. Paisley shirts are more creative than pink shirts. A blue denim shirt, or no shirt at all, is the ultimate in creativity. Beads or a locket are a sure sign of something close to genius.”

what makes capitalism so powerful is its resilience and adaptability. The game is never lost, only awaiting the next spin of the wheel. As a mode of production, capitalism is a perfect chameleon; it has no disabling convictions but profit and so can cater to any desire, even those inimical to

“in the sixties…hip became central to the way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public.” And so even “disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”

in a narrower sense, commerce did win: the counterculture’s call for the revitalization of spirituality and social consciousness inspired very few to make a permanent break even from television, the great portal to all that was wrong with society.

he was “interested in change, all right, but only as a process; and he is interested in values, but only as data.”

the not-so-rare species of academic who begins by trying to save the world and ends up trying to cash in.

“geodemography.” The basic notion was that approaches developed to predict urban crime could also help advertisers improve the marketing of their products.

the politics of recognition had a natural commercial counterpart that might be termed the business of recognition.

there was no United States, but forty distinctive nations all calling the same continent home.

it is far more taxing to learn to ignore messages that seem to speak to you specifically.

Were the networks reacting to fragmented audiences, or were they in fact fragmenting them? In retrospect, they were doing both.

Technology always embodies ideology, and the ideology in question was one of difference, recognition, and individuality. But commerce bows to none, taking its opportunities wherever they may lie.

Of course, people have always wanted accurate information about products, but that’s not advertising.

in the course of sustained channel surfing, the voluntary aspect of attention control may disappear entirely. The channel surfer is then in a mental state not unlike that of a newborn or a reptile. Having thus surrendered, the mind is simply jumping about and following whatever grabs it.

a highly counterintuitive point: technologies designed to increase our control over our attention will sometimes have the very opposite effect. They open us up to a stream of instinctive selections, and tiny rewards, the sum of which may be no reward at all.

Faced with a new abundance of choice and a friction-less system of choosing, we individuals, in our natural weak-mindedness, could not resist frittering away our attention, which once had been harvested from us so ceremoniously.

the most effective way of maintaining a behavior is not with a consistent, predictable reward, but rather with what is termed “variable reinforcement”—that is, rewards that vary in their frequency or magnitude.

behavior consistently rewarded is in fact more prone to “extinction” than behavior inconsistently rewarded.

“secular society’s rejoinder to the decline of religion and magic,” for in the “absence of saints or a God to look up to, for many people in western societies the void is being filled by celebrity culture.”

television was building a system to ensure that everyone would be famous, or have a chance to be.

reality television was like manna from heaven for the attention merchants. It came down to simple economics, or as one television executive observed: “A reality show can grab a primetime audience just as effectively as a good drama or comedy, but sometimes at half the price.”22 For this reason, and with little remark, over the early 2000s the business of television was fundamentally reset, as the reality model, by almost any measure, became the dominant form of programming,

No matter how desirable the financial calculus, no attention capture strategy has been able to stay ahead of the disenchantment effect indefinitely. Eventually, even the goose that lays the golden egg gets old and dies.