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

by Tim Wu

Twin Rivers is only one of the many school districts in the United States—mostly in poor or middle-class areas—that have begun to rely on selling access to their students as an essential revenue source. Some schools plaster ads across student lockers and hallway floors. 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. “Take your school to the digital age” is the motto of one screen provider: “everyone benefits.” What is perhaps most shocking about the introduction of advertising into public schools is just how uncontroversial and indeed logical it has seemed to those involved.

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.

At that price, he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky, potentially even suicidal, was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What Day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production.

From the beginning, The Herald established a specialty in the coverage of violent death.

When not chronicling death in its many forms, Bennett loved to gain attention for his paper by hurling insults and starting fights. Once he managed in a single issue to insult seven rival papers and their editors. He was perhaps the media’s first bona fide “troll.” As with contemporary trolls, Bennett’s insults were not clever.

We’ve already seen the attention merchant’s basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. But a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. 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 race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience’s baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant—just how far will he go to get his harvest?

In the case of the New York Sun, however, there is little evidence of even theoretical limits. For in reacting to its new competitors, the paper readily discarded what we would consider the paramount journalistic ethic, that of being bound by facts.

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. But its exploitation for commercial purposes is relatively new.

recreation.” Indeed after working through a series of menial jobs, 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.

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. But

“secret ingredient.” Every patent medicine needed something to set it apart from all the others making similar claims, some

It is easy to ascribe the success of such hokum to the gullibility of another age, until we stop to reflect that the techniques successfully used to sell patent medicine are still routinely used today.

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.

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 “

become one of the pivotal figures in the story of mass attention capture.1

Kitchener had the idea to make a direct and personal appeal to the British public. And thus began the first state-run attention harvest, or what historians would later call the “first systematic propaganda campaign directed at the civilian population.

his 1922 classic Public Opinion—was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it—the rough “stereotypes” (a word he coined in his book). When it came to the war, he believed that the “consent” of the governed had been, in his phrase, “manufactured.” Hence, as he wrote, “It is no longer possible…to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.”28

Lippmann came to see, is potentially propagandistic, in the sense of propagating a view. For it presents one set of facts, or one perspective, fostering or weakening some “stereotype” held by the mind.

Brands hardly existed before mass production; in a prior age, it was the reputation of the individual merchant that did the work, much as it still does today for doctors, accountants, and other professionals.

But by the 1920s, advertisers came to understand that a reputation, once necessarily earned, could now be manufactured like a war-will or any consumer good.

The new department was staffed entirely by women—“Lady Persuaders”—who were physically segregated from the rest of editorial, with their own office space, accounts, and even distinct style manual; they were asked to wear hats to distinguish themselves from female secretaries.

Not altogether. He buys a car, because it is at the moment the group custom to buy cars. The modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create circumstances which will modify that custom.

Many of the most talented copywriters, as we’ve seen, came from families steeped in organized religion. Some saw surprisingly little difference between the two callings.

At its worst, as Chase and Schlink argued, advertising actually tries to attack and distort the mechanisms of choice,

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.

In the 1920s, the idea of advertising on radio was controversial if not contemptible. Even Printer’s Ink had opined that “the family circle is not a public place, and advertising has no business intruding there unless invited.”5

When Amos ’n’ Andy had come on, Templin noticed something peculiar at this friend’s house: the entire family stopped what it was doing to gather around the radio and listen intently for the show’s entire duration.

For whatever reason, the second time was the charm. By the end of 1929, Amos ’n’ Andy had become a craze, and the first bona fide hit serial in broadcast history—and the first show people refused to miss, arranging their time around it. No

Nowadays we might say that Amos ’n’ Andy resembled a soap opera—but as we shall see, it was really soap operas that copied Amos ’n’ Andy.

First, while NBC might have originally considered itself a way to demonstrate the excellence of RCA’s radios, after Amos ’n’ Andy it was now clearly and irresistibly in the business of selling the attention of enormous audiences to those who could pay for and use it.

Needless to say, there would never be a backward glance to the days when the network existed to sell the hardware!19

In 1928, Paley made a bold offer to the nation’s many independent radio stations. The CBS network would provide any of them all of its sustaining content for free—on the sole condition that they agree to carry the sponsored content as well,

NBC, in contrast, was stingily charging its affiliates to license its sustaining programs, while also driving a hard bargain, on a show-by-show basis, over their share of proceeds from running the sponsored shows—to say nothing of setting very exacting technical requirements to become an NBC station. With CBS and Paley everything was free and easy, good times for all, and so stations were happy to join up.

Perhaps because of his empire’s stake in selling the hardware, he never seemed either to fully grasp or appreciate NBC’s true mission as an attention merchant. Perhaps he simply didn’t like the association with advertising and its hucksters. “We’re the pipes,” Sarnoff liked to tell his associates, sounding like an industrialist of a previous generation. His

Paley shook his head and succeeded in personally lobbying the FCC to slow it down or block it. Frank Stanton, longtime CBS executive, explained that “Bill did not want television, for he thought it would hurt radio.” At the time, Paley “didn’t see any profit in TV at all.

radio, once imagined as a public service, had been hijacked by commercial interests. Broadcast radio was, in its early days, thought of as a miracle of science, a sacred and blessed realm that ought be free from commercial intrusion. It was to be for the education, entertainment, and enlightenment of the public, and should always deliver “the best of everything” as John Reith of the BBC put it. But over the late 1920s and early 1930s the commercial radio network, embodied by NBC and CBS, had pulled radio very far from that original conception, and resistance was growing.

the attention merchant’s eternal dilemma: too little advertising and the business can’t grow; too much and the listener grows resentful and tunes out.

Every broadcast he began with “This…is London” and then simply described what he had seen that day. “Tonight, as on every other night, the rooftop watchers are peering out across the fantastic forest of London’s chimney pots. The anti-aircraft gunners stand ready. I have been walking tonight—there is a full moon, and the dirty-gray buildings appear white. The stars, the empty windows, are hidden. It’s a beautiful and lonesome city where men and women and children are trying to snatch a few hours sleep underground.”9

“To whom has propaganda to appeal? To the scientific intelligentsia, or to the less educated masses? It has to appeal forever and only to the masses!” The strong leader, by “understanding the great masses’ world of ideas and feelings, finds, by a correct psychological form, the way to the attention, and further to the heart, of the great masses.” Propaganda must “be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent….Therefore its spiritual level has to be screwed the lower, the greater the mass of people which one wants to attract.

memory requires a constant repetition of simple ideas. “The great masses’ receptive ability is only very limited, their understanding is small, but their forgetfulness is great. As a consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda has to limit itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans until even the very last man is able to imagine what is intended by such a word.

Finally, Hitler understood the demagogue’s most essential principle: to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion. And far less welcome: what the audience most wants is an excuse to experience fully the powerful feelings already lurking within them but which their better selves might lead them to suppress. “The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to

the city’s many beer halls had become popular venues for political speeches and even rallies of various sizes and political affiliations. Every evening, aspiring polemicists would test their mettle on the bibulous crowd.

Over the next few years, Hitler would give hundreds of similar speeches, perfecting his performance method. Over time, he developed a winning and invariant structure. He always stood in the same, upright, and serious way, and made the same gestures. His speeches began with a long silence, broken by a soft, almost intimate tone of great personal pain and vulnerability, in which he described his difficult upbringing, service in the war, and despair at Germany’s defeat. In a bridge section, he would, with rising fury, begin to assign blame, and denounce all that was wrong in the present. In an incredibly intense finish, he bellowed a flood of unrestrained hatred for Jews, plans for renewed greatness, and, finally, one more great call for German unity.

It was during the Munich years, too, that Hitler first began to conclude his speeches by leading his audiences in a rousing and angry chant.

off; one might even choose to listen to foreign stations. The Propaganda Ministry’s answer to such problems was to outfit a small army called the Funkwarte, the Radio Guard, party loyalists assigned to every neighborhood or apartment block to make sure that the radio was being listened

It is therefore more effective for the State to intervene before options are seen to exist. This creates less friction with the State but requires a larger effort: total attention control.