The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu, 2016 - From newspapers, posters, loudspeakers, radio, tv, magazines, internet - blogs, clickbait, viral content, social networks and smartphones, the book covers how our attention has been captured over the last 100 years - captured only to be resold. So the book is equal parts about advertising industry as well and how it has evolved alongside these technologies. I found it just as good as ‘Confessions of an advertising man’ by Ogilvy on that topic.
My notes -
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Corporate advertising in schools ensures warm association is established with Coca-cola and McDonald’s at an early age by EFP (Education Funding Partners - like ad-supported education?).
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The attention industry has gained more and more of our waking moments in exchange for conveniences and diversions
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Mass attention was first harvested for British war propaganda but today advertising industry has leveraged it to become a major part of the economy
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Our life experience will be equal to what we paid attention to, whether by choice or default
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Benjamin Day in the 1830s to compete with established newspapers of the day which had circulation of 2600 in a city of 300k (newspaper was a luxury item at 6c/day), devised a clever strategy of reselling the attention of his audience - by offering the paper for below cost of production at a penny a day and finding advertisers (’New York Sun’ was thus born).
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‘New York Sun’ found its best stories in police court with its dismal parade of wife beaters, drunkards, petty thieves and prostitutes. The lurid and comic material was exactly what his readership wanted - stories from which no one could look away
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Competition to New York Sun soon arrived with ‘The Herald’ which had a penchant for reporting violent death - suicides, murders, fires and accidents. It also started to insult rival newspapers and their editors (trolling in the 1830s!). NYS also invented fake news when it spoke at length of discoveries of life on the moon
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Gaining and holding attention so as to resell it is a race to the bottom towards garish and lurid content - of death and violence, trolling and fake news that is more likely to engage our automatic attention vs controlled attention
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The invention of posters that attracted the attention of passersby in the 1860s in Paris were the second milestone in industrialised harvesting of attention. Posters were soon everywhere until the anti-poster movement began to lobby and impose restrictions on where these ads could be placed (aesthetics) and to impose taxes.
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Every time your eye catches a poster (or a hoarding, or a billboard), your awareness or perhaps something more has been appropriated without consent, if only for a moment
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Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment, a patent medicine - was sold by Clark Stanley with startling images and evocative words (like in the Parisian posters) - it used its head as branding for trustworthiness - something Quaker Oats and Aunt Jemima (and Vasant & Co) use to this day
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Patent medicine ads soon took off and promised a cure for everything - from rheumatism, neuralgia, toothache, sprains etc. - some even promised immortality. There was usually a “secret ingredient”, something we fall for even today - like the “Air” in Nike shoes or gold-plating in audio cables or triple reverse osmosis in water filters
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Clark Stanley’s snake oil was advertised through roadshows and newspapers but later ones like Dr.Shoop through direct mail advertising (Spam)
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Hopkins who sold Dr.Shoop carried the idea to ‘Liquozone’ - or liquid ozone which could cure dandruff, malaria, anthrax, diphtheria and even cancer and even pioneered the idea of “free sample”
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Only after a muckraker picked up patent medicine and exposed their uselessness, Roosevelt passed the Foods and Drugs Act (and FDA as we know it today was born), criminalising false claims - thus snake oil went from being a cure-all to being a byword for fraud
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Propaganda arose from the church (propagating the faith). The British war propaganda used posters during WW-I for mass recruitment of soldiers, proceeded to aggressive open-air propaganda (with megaphones) and fleet of cine-motor vans (precursor to the drive-in movie). America later took this and amped it up even further and “manufactured consent”
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People used stereotypes to dumb down the complexities of the world. Something that will be used by war propaganda to propagate views that fostered or weakened them
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Intellectuals who read everything and think themselves immune to propaganda are in fact the easiest to manipulate (because all information fostered or weakened beliefs)
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Bernays, Freud’s nephew, the father of public relations (self-described), believed that a conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses was an important element to democratic society (something all democratic nations still follow). British and American war propaganda post WW-I inspired Adolf Hitler to take it to the next level
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Scientific advertising - create desire for products (demand engineering), create loyalty by creating an impression that something truly set them apart (branding), targeted advertisements
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Demand Engineering - involved creating problems were there were none to sell mouthwash and toothpaste (Halitosis makes you unpopular campaign). Halitosis was an unheard of word before Listerine introduced it (Freud influenced lot of early advertising)
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Imbuing products with traits customers can identify with started with floor cleaners targeted at women - establishing a nexus between product and customer (Bernays cleverly engineered demand for cigarettes among women by appealing to feminists to smoke and be like men)
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Women hired as “Lady Persuaders” did more harm than good by selling beauty products like Pond’s cold cream and Pears soap that tended to reinforce condescending biases that they spent years as activists to try and undo
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Consumers buy not what they freely want but what they are made to want
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Amos and Andy in 1929 was the first hit serial (radio) - the show people refused to miss, arranging their time around it - show reached 50 million in a population of 122m!! (was sponsored by Pepsodent). Thus was born the first “prime time” show
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Soap operas were started to colonise the day-time hours because a great deal of selling could be done in the story itself by appealing to women’s instinct of self-preservation, sex, and family instinct
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Prime time shows were a massive ritual of collective attention, shared awareness and even shared identity (only God and country before could elicit something similar)
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CBS beat NBC in the syndication game - it offered full programming for free and also paid its affiliates on the sole condition that they carry and run it unaltered (same model as New York Sun providing paper for free to get eyeballs)
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A continuous diet of pure sensational wears audiences out and makes them seek respose (NYT and WSJ thus arose as contempt for NYS and The Herald arose). Too little advertising and business can’t grow, too much and the listener grows resentful and tunes out
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Nielson installed their “black box” in people’s homes so it could figure out what people were tuning into (modern ratings thus born)
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Goebbels, chief propagandist of Nazi party used German radio to create a nation with one public opinion. Radio and loudspeakers deprived 80 million people of independent thought and subjected them to the will of one man
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In WW-I German war propaganda jumped to discuss merits of complex issues while American and British propaganda was purely reductive messages and vivid imagery. Hitler figured this out and asks in Mein Kampf, “Who should propaganda appeal to? To the scientific intelligentsia or to the less educated masses? Forever only to the masses” (Hitler worked in advertising)
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Hitler realised repetition of simple ideas worked best - Nuance was nonsense and complexity was risk - effective propaganda must limit itself to few points and use them like slogans until the last standing man grasped it
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What audience most wants is an excuse to experience fully the powerful feelings already lurking in them which their better selves suppress
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Hitler perfected his performance method - his speeches began with long silence, broken by a soft, almost intimate tone of pain and vulnerability, describing his service and despair for current affairs. In bridge section he would assign blame with rising fury, denounce all that was wrong and finished by bellowing intense hatred for Jews, plans for renewed greatness and calling for German unity (hilariously imitated by Chaplin in The Great Dictator)
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Crowd psychology - loss of individual responsibility makes individual in a crowd very malleable (easily influenced)
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Joint attention - when in a group brain’s faculties work differently. Two people solve a problem faster than one in isolation. Infant learns this when it follows parent’s gaze to pay attention to what they are looking at
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Freedom is not just in choosing options but also in what options are provided for you - A lot of restrictions to freedom happens in the latter than former - we don’t know what’s not there. If you don’t want people to choose Chocolate, don’t offer it as an option than to provide it and restrict it
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Choice maybe the cornerstone of individual freedom but humanity’s urge to surrender to something larger and to transcend the self is just as big. Propagandists and advertisers know this.
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Elvis Presley on Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 had 82.6% of the population tuning in - unsurpassed till today
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Unique selling proposition or “reason why” advertising worked best for medicines (Anacin pain relief with hammering on head and ‘fast relief’)
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Radio shows were sponsored by single sponsor (Like Pepsodent’s Amos and Andy) but innovation in TV gave rise to slots that could be sold to different advertisers (taking inspiration from magazines). Networks soon started to consider its audience as “inventory” measured using metrics like GRP
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To be home and awake was, to most Americans, to be sold something (with network television). The remote control is the first known ad blocker as it allowed you to mute the set
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To take control of one’s media consumption was to take control of one’s destiny
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Coke had phenomenally low “brand elasticity” (unwillingness to substitute with Pepsi). Pepsi started as “Brad’s drink” and was a medicine for dyspepsia or indigestion. Instead of marketing its inherent qualities, it was chosen to focus on people who bought it - thus the Pepsi generation was not consuming cola but an image of themselves
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Desire’s most natural endpoint is consumption
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PRIZM - Potential Ratings in ZIP Markets - the earliest known targeting system based on geographic clusters. It allowed advertisers to say different things to different people and win them all (It became important to know more about the Consumer)
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PRIZM led to more targeted channels like MTV and caused Audience fragmentation to focus on targeted ads. Channel surfing ensued as a result of the fragmentation leading to “grazing” or a scattered habit of viewing. Ads were now skippable through changing channel or fast-forward button on the VCR causing problems to advertisers (limited no. of eyeballs). The channel surfer though now had the mind of a new born or a reptile
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Operant conditioning - some actions are reinforced by positive consequences (checking email in the 90s). Variable reinforcement - you can’t say whether you will be rewarded or not and by how much. Consistently rewarded behaviour is prone to extinction
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In 1982, Space Invaders game was the highest grossing entertainment product in the US. It was like drugs ($4 a day habit) - it earned $2b, a quarter at a time (arcade game). Challenging to the point of utter frustration, most couldn’t last more than a minute. Donkey Kong and PacMan and several others followed.
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Driver of all technological advance is sex or warfare (Internet)
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By mid 90s, 50% of CDs sold had a AOL logo on them. AOL was signing up subscribers at the rate of 1 every 6 seconds. By ‘95 AOL had 4m subs by ‘97 12m. By ‘96 from charging $19.95 a month for 20 hours and $2.95/hr after that, it made it unlimited at $19.95/mo in ‘96 bringing in millions of new users. AOL mcap was $160b vs GM’s $56b
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The impulse to idolise has not faded in our secular age, only gone seeking after strange gods (Craving for humanity to be connected with the extraordinary)
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Time magazine’s emphasis on news told through stories about people gave rise to the concept of the modern celebrity (followed by People magazine)
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Celebrities now willingly discussed personal lives that was previous guarded. Fame was not just a by-product but professional capital
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Oprah took complete ownership of her show and sold it to the networks. Show practised a emotional, confessional style and moral accountability. Talk show a group therapy session - borrowed heavily from organised religion. Had commerce unabashedly in the center through product placements and recommendations (Oprah model)
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MTV got its content (music videos) for free and made money from nothing. However disenchantment started showing and to reinvent itself, started the concept of reality TV - talent shows, documentary soap. These were cheap to produce and just as good in getting eyeballs (Shark Tank, Real Housewives, Kardashians, The Deadliest Catch etc)
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Microsoft wanted to make the Internet more like the TV when it channeled money into MSNBC (flopped except for Slate mag)
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Google in early days felt advertising funded search engines will be biased towards them and wanted to keep them out but eventually gave in but left a lot of attention on the table by showing only relevant ads at right moments only through AdWords and become the most profitable Attention merchant in the world
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With the emergence of Weblog (or blog), for the first time so many people had a chance to know what others were thinking on a wide range of subjects
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YouTube democratised speech further where everybody could now be a speaker and an audience
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In our post-scarcity world, distribution is not king and neither is content. Conversation is kingdom and trust is king (Jeff Jarvis)
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Peretti pioneered ‘going viral’. A contagious media product should represent simplest form of the idea (payload). Fancy design and extraneous content made it less contagious by being a drag on the payload
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HuffingtonPost pioneered clickbait - content that seemed to take control of the mind, causing hand to involuntarily click
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Social networks led to people making an augmented representation of themselves - not as they were but at their contrived best. Once MySpace, Orkut and Friendster collapsed, Facebook was the last man standing. Facebook made 1/10th of Google’s ad revenue because latter’s users were close to making a purchase. Like buttons and tracking cookies allowed Facebook to do retargeting
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Like renters improving landlord’s property, people who wrote blogs moved onto Facebook to curate their images even as they were made to look at ads
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If celebrities were A-list, B-list and C-list. Internet gave rise to the D-list or the microfamous
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Fame or hunger for it would become a pandemic leaving them with chronic attention-whoredom as instagram invented the selfie
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The best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. Your time is scarce and your technologies know it (time on site, video views, pageviews metrics)
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Netflix decided to forego advertising and was somehow able to make people sit for longer hours watching content and even invented binge watch giving rise to comeback of long-form content (hyperserial, or a long movie like Breaking Bad)
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An iPhone that blocks tracking buries all the business models that have been prevalent since early 2000
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The closer a technology feels to being a part of us, the more important that we trust it (say like VR)
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Trump wanted to dominate media coverage, no matter the cost because all publicity is good publicity and turned the presidency into ratings monster by waging war every week against someone new in an episodic structure. He may win or lose but wins the attention contest (like British war propaganda)
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Most vital human resource in need of conservation and protection will be our own consciousness and mental space and we must not part with it cheaply
I like books that cover history of a space (recently read ‘Ten Drugs’ which does something similar for medicine) as you get transported across time and meet characters, events and regulations that shaped an industry over time organically. Tracking things this way gives us an idea of the trajectory of where things are headed. I totally enjoyed this book and would highly recommend a read. 10/10
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