The Attention Merchants. Today’s Biggest Industry.
19th-century philosopher William James, who inspired Tim Wu’s book: The Attention Merchants, said: your life experience is merely what you paid attention to.
In the 19th century, Benjamin Day created the New York Sun, the first Penny Press in the US. Contrary to his competition, he wasn’t interested in covering boring stories — his first-ever issue was the story of a heartbroken young man who committed suicide. The attention he brought was then resold to advertisers, making Day the first attention merchant. An attention merchant is anyone who works in the business of gathering a crowd by creating something hard to ignore and selling that attention to advertisers. Since its relatively new inception, the attention industry has gained a space in all aspects of our lives, always in exchange for new conveniences and diversions as a bargain (p. 10).
Despite Day creating the business model of attention gathering, it wasn’t until WWI that advertising became a mainstream practice through government mass propaganda, although corporations were already taking notes. Edward Bernays, who worked for the Creel Committee to influence public opinion to support the US in WWI, decided that “if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace,” with peace meaning using propaganda techniques for business purposes on multiple occasions. For instance, he encouraged women to smoke outside as a sign of freedom to increase Lucky Strikes cigarette sales and prestige. Capitalistic developments reached new heights of productivity, and companies started to spend more on advertising to overcome competition. With the rise of consumerism, advertising agencies offered their services to help create demand for problems hardly recognized as such. Listerine, for instance, used fear of halitosis to generate demand for their products (p. 57).
The arrival of radio and TV became the epicenter of human attention and allowed advertising to reach a new space: our homes. (p. 86) Pepsodent, a toothpaste company, took the first move advantage by sponsoring the radio sitcom Amos N Andy, which started the attractive phenomenon of prime-time shows. In the 1990s, the internet and computers arrived, offering attention merchants a new realm of opportunities. The first company to prove its effectiveness was Google, today more of an advertising platform than a search engine. We might use their services for free, but Google has built most of its market share by selling our attention to advertisers. To a similar extent, most of the content online depends on the generation of clicks, often forcing publishers to degrade their content in exchange for greater attention, as Benjamin Day did with the Penny Press.
Wu mentions in his book that consumers have had periodic moments of inherent resistance when they thought advertising had gone too far. Much of the early advertising consisted of patent medicine advertising: hard-sell ads with deceiving information. As a response, in 1906, the Food and Drugs Act was signed. In 1930, a rising consumer movement forced the Federal Government to control factual inaccuracies of ads in response to deceiving information shared by Lucky Strike cigarettes. In the 50s, Zenith, a tech firm, invented the first remote control to mute TV ads rather than allowing people to switch channels from their couches. Today, almost 40% of internet users use an ad blocker while surfing the internet. At some level, and throughout time, these revolts are the expressions of the desire to reclaim our attention and, with that, our autonomy. As 19th-century philosopher William James (who inspired this book) said, your life experience is merely what you paid attention to.
