*The Attention Merchants *by Tim Wu is about the various ways that people have tried to control our attention. From dictators, to behavioral psychologists and psychoanalysts, to advertising executives and internet entrepreneurs – the last century, and the current one, is one that will be remembered in history as that of the great attention merchants.
In the modern age, it has become possible for the human being to capture the time and attention of another, and if they can do so successfully for long enough, they can make a fortune. This, in summary, is what the internet is all about. And it looks like this trend will continue for the foreseeable future, with no real signs of every slowing down.
Chapter 4: Demand Engineering
A commonly held narrative is that Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernayes, transformed American advertising. But it’s not that simple. While Freud’s ideas did circulate, it is hard to prove that advertisers made use of them. But the data does suggest that Freud’s competition, the behavioral school of psychology, inspired many advertising projects.
For Watson, unlike Freud, mental states and moods were irrelevant. “The time seems to have come,” he said, “when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness.” Instead, he pursued a unitary theory of animal response, for the behaviorist “recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.”17
Watson thought that humans could be conditioned to respond in predictable ways, just like animals.
**In the one on “Little Albert,” a human version of Pavlov’s experiments on dogs, Watson induced a phobia of rats in an eleven-month-old. He did so by striking a metal bar with a hammer behind the baby’s head every time a white rat was shown to him. After seven weeks of conditioning, the child, initially friendly to the rodent, began to fear it, bursting into tears at the sight of it. The child, in fact, began to fear anything white and furry—Watson bragged that “now he fears even Santa Claus.”**18 * At J.
Watson was, in some sense, given a chance to perform his experiments on a larger population. As he maintained, “To make your consumer react, it is only necessary to confront him with either fundamental or conditioned emotional stimuli.”
Watson became a hot name in the advertising industry. Several firms sought out his services.
Soon Resor made Watson an “ambassador-at-large” and an account executive. When not advising on campaigns, he traveled America and the globe to sell executives on scientific advertising, and on his firm, which possessed all the tools necessary to control the minds of the public. As he said it plainly in one speech: “Since the time the serpent in the Garden of Eden influenced Eve and Eve in turn persuaded Adam, the world has tried to find out ways and means of controlling human behavior.
In advertising, we call the process selling. During this period it also struck businessmen, as if all at once, that if America was becoming a consumer society, most of this new purchasing of household goods was being done by the lady of the house. “In the purchase of things for personal use,” declared one authority in 1921, “men do very little on their own initiative.” Companies, run mostly by men, therefore, came to see cracking the code of the female consumer as the key to commerce. As an advertisement in Printer’s Ink put it, “The proper study of mankind is man… but the proper study of markets is women.”
To men of industry, however, the promised land was mostly a terra incognita. Hence, advertising’s third major development was a great new effort to appeal to women—through what would later be called “targeted” advertisements. A famous early advertisement for Woodbury soap, crafted by a woman named Helen Lansdowne, typified the new approach.
Initially ads directed at women relied on worn out stereotypes. But then an entirely new approach was made. It wasn’t “sex.” But rather, it created the promise of a better life. In other words, they didn’t appeal to the female sexual unconscious, and they didn’t try to advertise the usefulness of the product; instead, they used images to represent the promise of a better life.
Lansdowne went in an entirely different direction. In her advertisement, a dashing clean-shaven man in white tie is pictured with his arm wrapped around a beautiful woman, whose hand he holds. His cheek rests against her temple; he appears enthralled, while she stares pointedly at the viewer, her skin aglow. “A Skin you love to touch,” reads the copy. “You, too, can have the charm of a radiant, velvety skin.”
Chapter 5: A Long Lucky Run
The cigarette company Lucky Strike was trying to figure out how to acquire more customers.
To round out the team, Hill also hired Edward Bernays, who had just released his most acclaimed work, Propaganda, espousing his ideas of how the techniques government had developed during the war could now be applied to the purposes of business. The two got down to work, though not always together. What might make Lucky Strike stand out? In 1917, the brand had gotten its start with an idea conceived by Hopkins.
“It’s toasted” was the slogan, the “secret” step supposedly yielding a better flavor. In the mid-1920s, Lasker built on the concept with a campaign borrowing from patent medicine’s playbook: the brand was presented as a health tonic—specifically, a cure for the problem of sore throats caused by most cigarettes.
To drive home the hygienic benefit, Lasker ran a “precious voice” campaign, with testimonials from opera stars and other singers. What could be more persuasive than the Metropolitan Opera’s lead soprano attesting that she smoked Luckies to protect her livelihood?5 The testimonials were, of course, paid for, but it is still startling that Lasker was able to coax the singers into the effort. Even by the late 1920s, there were inklings that cigarettes might be bad for you. So, to preempt the truth, Lasker deployed another old patent medicine trick: he tried to co-opt medical authority.
The American Tobacco Company sent doctors free cartons of Luckies in exchange for a vague nod that they might be less abrasive than other brands. Whether or not the doctors knew what they were agreeing to, Lord & Thomas went ahead with ads that portrayed them as, in effect, touting the health benefits of smoking Lucky Strikes. One advertisement features a doctor in a white coat holding up a packet, with the copy: “20,679 physicians say ‘LUCKIES are less irritating’…Your throat protection.”
In the late 1920’s, it was taboo for women to smoke in public and in some places, it was illegal.
Good soldiers both, Lasker and Bernays soon caught the spirit of women’s liberation, or at least noticed its utility. Lasker allowed that, after his wife had been asked to refrain from smoking in a restaurant, he was determined “to break down the prejudice against women smoking.”
But it was Bernays, the public relations man, who took more seriously the idea of a commercial cause in social-activist clothing. He was in fact a critic of advertising in the Hopkins mold, and believed that ideally one should seek to make it obsolete. “The old-fashioned propagandist,” wrote Bernays, “using almost exclusively the appeal of the printed word, tried to persuade the individual reader to buy a definite article, immediately.”
Bernays wanted to create a new way of advertising to the consumer, by changing customs and norms at a fundamental level.
He asked: What are the true reasons why the purchaser is planning to spend his money on a new car instead of on a new piano? Because he has decided that he wants the commodity called locomotion more than he wants the commodity called music? 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.
The skilled propagandist could be not merely an engineer of demand, then, but a maker of manners, bringing a multiplier effect to the commercial use of attention capture. Bernays sought to overthrow the taboo against women smoking outside the home by framing it as an abridgement of their freedom. Relying on some back-of-the-envelope Freudian analysis, including the idea of cigarettes as phallic objects and a source of oral satisfaction, he presented smokes as vital to a fuller life.
And he hired a group of attractive women to march in the 1929 New York City Easter Day Parade, brandishing their Lucky Strikes, or “torches of freedom.”10 He had paid Ruth Hale, a prominent feminist, to sign the letter inviting the women to the march. “Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” it thundered.
While a great story, we aren’t sure to what extent Bernays was responsible for this event. It lends the narrative more credibility that Noam Chomsky, a serious critic of propaganda, has echoed the idea that Bernays got women to smoke.
Chapter 6: Not with a Bang But With a Wimper
The average woman was outraged, Business Week reported, to find that “the soap which made her so popular at the dance was made with a little creosol… recommended by the Government for disinfecting cars, barns and chicken yards.”
Some of the most intense new critics of advertising were internal. In 1928, Theodore MacManus, who had so famously branded Cadillac, Dodge, and Chrysler, decided he’d had it.
Writing in The Atlantic, he denounced both his own industry and the whole of modern civilization: “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.” A serious Catholic, he blamed the American brand of Protestantism for creating a “Nadir of Nothingness” in which people worshipped consumer goods as “brightly packaged gifts of the gods.”
Helen Woodward, a copywriter of prominence, wrote a popular book lamenting the emptiness of what she’d done with her life. She offered a professional confession: “In the advertising business we thought ourselves important. We thought we knew what we were doing; we had our plans for next week or next year. The realization came to me with a slow shock that I was nothing, we were nothing. We were feathers all of us, blown about by winds which we neither understood nor controlled.”
The darkest was the work of James Rorty, another former copywriter, who wrote Our Master’s Voice: Advertising (1934), in which he described the job’s effect on the soul.
The adman, he wrote, “inevitably empties himself of human qualities. His daily traffic in half-truths and outright deceptions is subtly and cumulatively degrading. No man can give his days to barbarous frivolity and live. And ad-men don’t live. They become dull, resigned, hopeless.
Chapter 9: Total Attention Control, or The Madness of Crowds
Hitler’s entire approach to propaganda might be understood as a reaction to the rationalism for which German thinkers were known. Instead, he had an alarmingly intuitive understanding of how to appeal to a mass audience and to the reptilian core.
In Mein Kampf, he asks, “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.” It can also be understood as a reflection of his time working for the advertising industry. In the early 1910s, while living in Vienna, Hitler made money as a freelancer, drawing advertising posters for