Table of Contents
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 products like hair tonic, soap, and “Teddy Antiperspirant foot powder.” In Mein Kampf he suggests that propaganda need be like advertising, and seek first to attract attention:
“A poster’s art lies in the designer’s ability to catch the masses’ attention by outline and color,” he writes. It must give “an idea of the importance of the exhibition, but it is in no way to be a substitute for the art represented by the exhibition.” Similarly “the task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses towards certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses’ field of vision.” Those who are “already scientifically experienced or…striving towards education and knowledge” are not the subject. Hitler also intuited a few other basic truths about how we process information: since everything can be ignored, imprinting information in the 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.” Nuance was nonsense; complexity was a risk: As soon as one sacrifices this basic principle and tries to become versatile, the effect will fritter away, as the masses are neither able to digest the material offered nor to retain it.”
One couldn’t overstate the intensity of the effort required, for the masses “with their inertia, always need a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and they will lend their memories only to the thousandfold repetition of the most simple ideas.” 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 anything that is half-hearted and weak. Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doctrine, tolerating no other beside itself.”
If to pay attention is to open the mind to information, to do so in an animated crowd is to fling the doors wide open. To be exposed to any information is to be influenced, but in crowds the possibilities go well beyond everyday experience. Gustave Le Bon, the first theorist of crowd psychology, held that it is loss of individual responsibility that makes the individual in the crowd more malleable.
Freud would say that the superego was supplanted by the will of the crowd, as unconscious wishes rise to the surface and are shared. In any case, we know it when we see it.
Le Bon and Freud are now hardly considered cutting-edge guides to how the mind works, but here, in the words of the enraptured, their ideas seem to shine through. Alfons Heck would remember attending a Nazi rally as a boy in the 1930s. He was not particularly partial to or interested in Hitler; yet at the conclusion of the führer’s speech the boy was transformed: “From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul.” The rally Heck attended, one of those held annually at Nuremberg, boosted Hitler’s oratorical effects with various other elements— lights, giant swastika banners, and marching men—to create what Albert Speer called “total theatre.”
As one attendant described the experience: Nothing like it has ever been seen before. The wide field resembles a powerful Gothic cathedral made of light….One hundred and forty thousand people…cannot tear their eyes away from the sight. Are we dreaming, or is it real? Is it possible to imagine a thing like that?… Seven columns of flags pour into the spaces between the ranks….All you can see is an undulating stream, red and broad, its surface sparking with gold and silver, which slowly comes closer like fiery lava. As Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker who documented the 1935 gathering called the “Rally of Freedom,” wrote, “What I witnessed in Nuremberg…is one of the most remarkable events I have ever experienced. It was all so gripping and grandiose that I cannot compare it to anything I experienced before as an artist.
Chapter 10: Peak Attention
Launched in 1955, the Marlboro Man campaign was Burnett’s most successful and among the most astonishing campaigns in the history of demand engineering. But upon the cowboy’s appearance, Marlboro went from a mere 1 percent of sales to become the fourth bestselling brand in the United States within a year; its sales increased by an astonishing 3,000 percent over that time. Burnett had not modeled the Marlboro Man on himself—he was “rumpled, pillow-shaped, balding and jowly” with “heavy horn-rimmed glasses perched on his spud-like nose.”
He also proclaimed himself adverse to psychological theory, though he did write that “the cowboy is an almost universal symbol of admired masculinity,” and perhaps he had sensed among men in the civilizing 1950s a need for reassurances on that score. In any event advertising was proving that it could project not only “reasons why” but whole mythologies; it was naturally suited to things of the spirit. If Burnett was trafficking in archetypes, he was not alone; Jungian and Freudian thought had reached the zenith of their influence, both in society and in the advertising industry, where once they had been skeptically brushed off.
If ideas of appealing to unconscious desires were once merely in the air, now an array of firms run by professional psychologists offered “motivation research,” aimed at the deepest human desires. It is hard to measure, and easy to exaggerate, how effective this analysis was; nonetheless, by 1954 there were at least eight good-sized firms offering it as a billable service. Just as in the good old days, it was under the guise of a science, until, as one reporter put it in 1959, “The difference between an ad man and a behavioral scientist became only a matter of degree.”
Among the most outspoken, highly paid, and controversial of the new commercial psychologists was Ernest Dichter —“Mr. Mass Motivations,” as he was sometimes known. A Freudian from Austria, Dichter made his name and fortune as an advisor to companies with marketing problems.
When hired by food manufacturers, he began by characterizing a product as “male” or “female” and carrying on from there. Elongated edibles like asparagus he predictably considered male. He theorized that women were uncomfortable eating wieners, being “spellbound and definitely attracted by the meats.”
Perhaps Dichter’s most famous effort was one of his first, a job he did for Chrysler. The automaker was concerned about sales of its new model, the Plymouth. Chrysler posed two questions to its corporate therapist: “1. Why do most car buyers buy the same make as their last car? 2. What influence do women have on the purchase of cars?” In response, Dichter did not really answer the questions. Instead, he wrote, “Tell me how a man drives, and I will tell you what kind of man he is.”
Chapter 12: The Great Refusal
Timothy Leary and his followers wanted the public to block out the messages of the mainstream media and other institutions, which they saw as little more than tools of mass manipulation. Instead the Federation was setting forth on an inward voyage, with a bit of help: to reconfigure the public mind and its priorities, Leary believed in the great potential of taking psychedelic drugs—like LSD—still legal then.
By the time of his lunch with McLuhan, Leary was growing in fame and wanted to bring his ideas to a broader audience; his great ambition was to reach the young, now understood to be broadly disillusioned with how things were and looking for something different. As he would describe it, “For the first time in our history, a large and influential sector of the populace was coming to disrespect institutional authority,” giving rise to a contest between “the old industrial society and the new information society.”
He believed that McLuhan might be able to tell him how he could reach all the disaffected. McLuhan was fairly sympathetic to Leary’s project. For McLuhan saw the media as having become “extensions of man”—as much a part of us as our skin. To take control of one’s media consumption was therefore a form of self-determination, a seizing of one’s own destiny. And so after hearing Leary out, he finally gave him some counterintuitive advice: “You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer,” said McLuhan. “But the key to your work is advertising.”
Later that day, in the shower, the answer suddenly came to him. All he needed was the right occasion to bring it to a broader audience. — Late in 1966, a “psychedelic artist” named Michael Bowen invited Leary to an event in San Francisco meant to unite various emerging countercultural and “alternative” groups— alienated students, poets, rock musicians, jazz hipsters, and members of biker gangs. His advertising posters billed the event as “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.” And so it was on January 14, 1967, in Golden Gate Park that Leary first took his carefully con constructed message to a broader audience. His speech centered on the infectious refrain, repeated over and over: “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” McLuhan’s advice worked.
Leary’s line caught on as well as any advertising slogan and became, effectively, the motto of the counterculture. Most would take Leary’s words as a call to pay attention to where your attention is paid; mind what you open your mind for. If this was not America’s first call to attentional revolt— Packard and Lippmann had each issued his own, as we’ve seen—Leary’s proposed a far broader compass of things to ignore, not only messages from television and government but college, work, parents, as well as other sources of authority. He called for a complete attentional revolution. Some two decades on, Leary would write that “unhappily,” his ideas had been “often misinterpreted to mean ‘Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.’ ”
Indeed, in the 1960s it was earnestly asked where one was supposed to go after dropping out. But enough who got the message understood that it referred to something more profound, and were able to connect Leary’s prescription with the vision of other social critics. Among the most influential of these was another guru of the counterculture, Herbert Marcuse of the “Frankfurt School,” one of a set of German philosophers who’d fled the Third Reich in the 1930s. Marcuse believed that he was witnessing a “Great Refusal”—a term he first coined in the 1950s to describe “the protest against unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom—‘to live without anxiety.’ ”
Like Leary—whom he may have inspired in part—Marcuse tended to believe that liberation could not be achieved from within the system, but required its fundamental reconstruction. “Intellectual freedom,” he surmised in 1964, “would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination” and also the “abolition of ‘public opinion’ along with its makers.”
And so the youth movement held out the promise for something never achieved except in mythology—the radical liberation of the human condition. It was a far more ambitious aim than anything hoped for even by Karl Marx and his followers, who simply sought liberation from an unfair economic system. Marcuse envisioned an end to all forms of repression, whether social, economic, or technological—a sort of return to the Garden of Eden. By this Great Refusal, he dared hope, the people might “recognize the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture, even in the most spectacular manifestations of technical progress.”
Chapter 15: Invaders
By 1980, in the United States alone, video games were consuming 11.2 billion quarters annually, yielding $2.8 billion in revenue; by the early 1980s, the estimate was $5 billion, exceeding, for a while, the income of the film industry. Video games also consumed something else, human attention, in a way that was both old and new at the same time. As in any real game—be it tennis, pinball, or blackjack —the fast-flowing stimuli constantly engage the visual cortex, which reacts automatically to movement.
No intentional focus is required, which explains why children and adults with Attention Deficit Disorder find the action of video games as engrossing as anyone else. Unlike games in reality, however, video games are not constrained by the laws of physics, making possible a more incremental calibration of the challenges involved, duration, and related factors in the attempt to keep players coming back.4 But there were big differences between the new games and other things we have discussed that get us to pay attention, whether it be listening to Amos ’n’ Andy, watching a sitcom, or reading email. For one, the business model: it was cash for an experience, rather like seeing a play or reading a book.
The attention merchant model would not be contemplated until much later. Second, playing a game like Space Invaders was, as we’ve said, challenging—to the point of utter frustration. Most couldn’t last longer than a minute. The games, at this stage at least, aimed for something completely different. The early players of Space Invaders were captured not by the dazzling graphics and sounds of today’s narrative-based games, but by the urge to match their skills against the machine in the hope of finding, if only for a moment, that perfect balance between their abilities and the ghosts or space monsters chasing them. In this way, you might say they effected another form of operant conditioning. Only a few games seem to have successfully achieved that balance.
Some were simply too hard, others too easy, and those aren’t really the only variables anyhow. But the best could sustain excitement, or even induce a “flow state,” that form of contentment, of “optimal experience,” described by the cognitive scientist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, in which people feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities.” It was more than enough to keep people coming back, in their billions, across the world, and parting with their hard-earned money for a chance at such transcendence.
Chapter 17: Establishment of the Celebrity Industrial Complex
The strength of these feelings is one reason why our celebrity culture is so frequently linked with older traditions of worship. For that ecstatic possibility of transcending the ordinary and glimpsing the infinite hardly originates in the twentieth century, but is a universal longing reflected in almost every spiritual tradition. The historian Karen Armstrong describes it as an “essential craving” of all humanity to be connected with the “extraordinary”: “It touches us within, lifts us momentarily beyond ourselves, so that we seem to inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and feel in touch with the deeper currents of life.”
Such transcendence of the mundane condition has since ancient times been identified with heroes, demigods, and saints, humans who occupy a somewhat exalted position yet also remain accessible, allowing us some taste of another realm. At one time, this was also true of royalty (and in a few places it still is). What is particular to modernity, then, is not the existence of such individuals but rather the idea of constructing an industry based on the demand for feeling some communion with them, on our willingness to idolize them (literally)—an industry that monetizes their capacity to capture our rapt attention.
Perhaps, as the sociologist Chris Rojek theorizes, this is “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.” Of course, this is hardly to suggest that celebrity culture actually is a religion. People and other celebrity pantheons do not aim to provide cosmogonies, or ethical teachings, even if celebrity manners do have a depressing tendency to become normative.
The point is simply that whatever the neurological basis of religious experiences, something of the same mechanism seems to be activated by the existence, and particularly the proximity, of the most illustrious. That perhaps explains why, for some, celebrity culture is so abominable; it is the ancient disgust with idol worship, triggering an atavistic emotional reaction, like the rage felt by Moses when he burned the golden calf, ground it into a powder, and, scattering it on the water, forced his people to drink it.
In 1956, two psychologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, would conclude that television’s representation of celebrities was carefully constructed to create an “illusion of intimacy”—to make viewers believe that they actually were developing a relationship with the famous people on TV. Certain techniques particular to variety but also the chat shows produced this effect: recourse to small talk, the use of first names, and close-ups, among others, acted to close the gap between the audience and the guests, engendering the sense in the viewer of being “part of a circle of friends.”
The two coined the term “para-social interaction” to describe this “intimacy at a distance.” So it is that, for many people, celebrities have become part of their built attentional environment, allowing them regular glimpses into that other world inhabited by magical creatures who look something like us, yet are beyond us. Our deities are of course nothing like the God of Abraham, or even His saints. They are, rather, more like the pagan gods of old, prone to fits of anger and vindictiveness, petty jealousies, and embarrassing bouts of drunkenness. But this only lends to their illusion of accessibility, and at least for commercial purposes makes them more compelling to follow.
Chapter 18: The Oprah Model
But apart from all her undeniable talents and abilities and charms, Oprah Winfrey also offered something unique in daytime television: food for the hungers traditionally fed by organized religion and spirituality. Her shows were a daily dose of redemptive confession or suffering, a vision of justice, and the promise of salvation in this life.
At times Winfrey described her work as a religious mission: “I am the instrument of God. I am his messenger. My show is my ministry.” If we take Winfrey at her word and consider her work a ministry, it would have been one virtually unrivaled in size and influence in the late twentieth century. Oprah’s teachings, as a rule, hewed to a generally Christian view of existence, emphasizing love for the distressed, human weakness, life as a struggle, the value of confessing sin, and an ongoing effort to achieve redemption.
She also emphasized ideas with twentieth-century origins, like the importance of self-esteem and self-respect, of positive thinking, and of treating oneself well. “Live your best life” was one of the show’s mottos. But in one major respect Winfrey’s teaching tended to differ considerably from both Christianity and other traditional religions, which steadfastly warn of the spiritual dangers of materialism. *
The show’s prescriptions for personal growth always included consumption as a means of self-actualization and self-reward. “For her, transformation is about self-esteem and about buying stuff,” says Susan Mackey-Kallis.13 Viewers were encouraged to treat themselves well with their purchases (“show yourself love”).
Oprah’s great innovation was to amalgamate the ancient attention-capturing potential of a great faith with the programming function of a broadcaster, and the mass drawing power of her own celebrity. It was by the standards of any attention merchant a potent proffer for advertisers.
Advertising was indeed Winfrey’s main revenue source, and when she sold her audiences she was delivering not mere eyeballs but minds whose buying decisions had been conditioned by her unusually strong influence, which eventually “exceed[ed] that of any other celebrity—perhaps in history,” according to Craig Garthwaite of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.
Chapter 20: The Kingdom of Content
Microsoft’s attempt to capture the internet.
If anyone had made a fortune by cornering the market for nuts and bolts and sticking to it, it was Microsoft.1 It was a surprise, therefore, when on January 3, 1996, its chief executive, Bill Gates, wearing his large, dark-framed glasses that were not yet a hipster affectation but still the sign of the true nerd, posted an essay on Microsoft’s website, with a counterintuitive title: “Content Is King.”
At the time of that coronation, Internet “content” consisted mainly of homemade web pages with flashing words and the text forums where geeks discussed the pluses and minuses of object-oriented programming languages. Nevertheless, Gates prophesied an explosion of new creativity that would dominate the Internet’s future.
“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting,” he wrote, adding, “The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries…but the longterm winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment.” But his prediction also came with a warning that to succeed, Internet content would have to be good: If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video.
They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines. And so, at the command of its great leader, the world’s most profitable company would spring to action, beginning a massive, multibillion-dollar effort to seize the emerging market being created by “convergence,” a world called “Internet-television.” A new breed of attention merchant was being born, and Microsoft planned to rule them all. Unfortunately, as Gates had warned, anyone who would rule the Internet had better make his content good.
For Microsoft, that turned out to be the sticking point. It was not for want of effort or resources. Microsoft opened an entire new complex in Redmond, California, at some distance from its main offices, which it staffed with “content people” specially imported from New York and Los Angeles. The team was comprised of “black-clad creative types,” reported The New York Times, tasked with “building a new, chic kind of media business.”
In reality, the new hires were given an impossible task: that of inventing both a new platform and an entirely new form of content—one that was not television, film, or a computer game but instead “interactive” and that capitalized on “convergence” via a new portal named “MSN 2.0.” That was the name of the interface being preinstalled on every new Windows machine and designed to make the Internet feel more like a television. Reviews of MSN 2.0—which had launched with the slogan “Every new universe begins with a big bang”—were unkind.
When it finally launched, MSNBC elected to make itself a copy of CNN, with one exception: it featured a show named The Site, devoted to the Internet revolution. The synergy, whatever it was supposed to be, failed to materialize, and facing low ratings MSNBC executives turned to old-school cable thinking. Mining demographics, they noticed that left-leaning viewers lacked their own cable news network. MSNBC would therefore become the mirror image of Fox News; the “MS” in MSNBC would linger there, like an old store sign that the new owner forgot to take down.
Microsoft’s only successful investments in this period were Slate, which billed itself as the very first online magazine and ultimately proved the viability of the concept, and the Xbox gaming console, which was the kind of nutsand-bolts market entry that Microsoft had always done well. Most of the rest was a fiasco of the first order. In short, Microsoft couldn’t quite crack the nut; the idea of merging television and the Internet was just too simplistic.
In effect, Microsoft treated the Internet as if it were merely a new channel on which it could broadcast content, as if what had been invented was an extension of cable television. But the impulse was not altogether misguided, for someone was going to make money selling all of the attention the Internet was capturing. It just wasn’t going to be Microsoft. The most successful contestant would be the one that truly understood the new platform and how it would be used.
Microsoft’s main competitor, Google, emerged.
By the late 1990s, as Microsoft’s content initiative faded, word was spreading about a new company named Google, whose specialty was search. Search became a major application as the Internet got more populated, fast becoming wild and woolly, too vast to tune in to like a TV channel. There were a number of search engines running— Lycos, Magellan, AltaVista, Excite, Yahoo!, which originally launched as an Internet directory, to name a few. But it was soon clear that Google did search better than anyone else; its inventors were smart, its algorithm was wicked, and its code was tight.
Google was more like an academic project than a firm, and as it gained in popularity, it was burning through cash at a terrifying rate, with nary a business model in sight. As cofounder Sergey Brin reflected later, “I felt like a schmuck. I had an Internet start-up—so did everyone else. It was unprofitable, like everyone else’s and how hard is that?”
It is a fascinating moment to contemplate. Tech’s hottest firm stood at a fork in the road, pondering its future and, being an unusually deliberative company, tried to think through the consequences of each choice. Thanks to the growth of search, Google was capturing bushels of attention, but how to capitalize on that? As we’ve seen, there have always been two ways of converting attention into cash. The older is to charge admission, as to the spectacle, on the model of the opera or HBO or a book; for Google this would mean licensing or selling access to a premium product.
The second is to resell the attention gained, that being the model of the attention merchant.*
Before Google had come to its fork in the road, Page had strenuously insisted in a piece coauthored with Brin that “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” As an engineer and scientist, Page had wanted to build a clean, pure tool, free of commerce’s distortions.
Bill Gross was Google’s biggest rival.
His aversion, moreover, was not purely academic: he had seen what an advertising-driven search engine looked like, peddled by a man whom both Brin and Page found distasteful—a character, now mainly forgotten, who was for a while Google’s greatest rival. His name was Bill Gross.
He proposed a new concept for Internet search: instead of some fancy algorithm, he said, why not just sell places in search results to the highest bidder? While Gross’s presentation was engaging, the response was not friendly.
But Bill Gross was not the type to be deterred. Issuing from a rough-and-tumble 1990s dot-com culture, he was famous for turning one idea (supposedly inspired by Steven Spielberg) into a company nearly overnight at his start-up incubator Idealab. He was given to saying things like “The old rules don’t apply when you’re an Internet company.”
His NetZero was a “free” Internet service that depended on ads and similar tracking practices, at least until its collapse. Gross would turn his “highest bidder” search idea into a company named GoTo.com, which got its start seven months before Google and was, for a while, its main competitor. Unlike Google, GoTo took payment from advertisers in return for higher search rankings in the search results; “relevance” depended on dollars spent in this scheme of search payola. Or, as Gross spun it, “We’re not letting a blind algorithm decide.”
GoTo’s approach was a relative of AOL’s paid-for walled garden, and its trick of baiting users with search and delivering ads was branded misleading and unethical by critics; one complained, “If a middle school student does a search for ‘nutrition’ on GoTo, the first 221 sites listed are bidders” (mainly sites selling diets). When asked by The New York Times whether his search systematically favored commercial results, Gross answered that anyone could pony up for the same privilege. “
Google eventually beat the competition.
Google had, in fact, laid bare what had originally been so miraculous about the attention merchant model—getting something truly desirable at no apparent cost. For what really seemed like nothing, the public got the best search ever designed and, in time, other goodies as well, like free email with unlimited storage, peerless maps, the world’s libraries, and even research devoted to exciting innovations like self-driving cars. Of course, there was, as there always is, a quid pro quo: in its ripest state, the buying public was exposed to sales pitches; which might prove useful but then again might not.
Google also began to collect a lot of information about a lot of people. Nevertheless, Page, who had the most qualms about advertising, told Wired’s Steven Levy that he’d begun to feel that AdWords was a good and just innovation. “From that point on,” writes Levy, “Brin and Page saw nothing but glory in the bottom line.”
Page may have felt he’d outwitted the Devil, but so do all Faustian characters. While the safeguards in AdWords would keep Google’s core product uncompromised for the time being, corporate life is long, and shareholder demand for growth unremitting. In Wall Street’s view, even the most robust advertising revenues always have room for improvement. In time, this reality would put pressure on the original bargain that Google struck with the public. Even if AdWords was a paradigm shift, it was still advertising, and Google, however ingenious, was still an attention merchant. It would, henceforth, always be serving two masters, beauty and the beast.