- Premise. Our attention is the very experience of living. Reclaiming it – not parting it as cheaply and unthinkingly as we're used to, is to avoid a life of enslavement by propagandas and the pervasive consumer & celebrity culture.
- For majority of human history, organized religion had a monopoly on human attention – until its decline. With advent of Capitalism in late 1800s, commercial attention harvestors, especially the advertising industry, emerged to fill the vacuum. In fact many agency copywriters came from families with preaching / church backgrounds. Cooliage even called advertising "ministers to the spiritual side of trade."
Who were the attention merchants? What were their specialities or innovations?
- Benjamin Day and The New York Sun / Penny Papers. Selling newspaper with clickbaiting stories at price below production cost to cheaply amass large readership, and sell them en bloc to advertisers. Readers are no longer the customers but the product.
- Parisan posters. Harvesting attention requires appealing to our "reptilian core" part of the brain that are particularly susceptible to attention triggers: startling images and evocative words eg babies and monsters, sexualized bodies.
- Clark Stanley and The Snake Oil / Patent Medicine. Human face as branding (Aunt Jemima, Quaker Oats). Promises too good to be true. Secret ingredient that differentiates the product from rest. Direct mail advertising (spaming). For the first time advertising was thought to be standalone a method for "value creation"; and soon later, a subject of science. Eventually patent medicine was busted by journalism. Public outcry and pass of legislation to curb false advertising.
- "For 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."
- Patent medicine later inspired the advertising campaigns for cigarettes. Lucky Strike, sells to women, claimed to cure bad breathe, cause weight loss and be a symbol for female liberation. Same outcome – busted and public outcry.
- Pioneers of scientific advertising. Scale and accumulated expertise cemented a breed of established brokers for the new attention economy. Corporate advertising expense rose from $700m in 1914 to $30bn in 1929, or 3% of GDP. Also role of psychology, Freudian view of the unconscious, behavioural science.
- Claude Hopkins, demand engineering. Selling not new product to solve existing problems, but new problems where they did not exist before. Toothpaste and mouthwash. "Reason why" advertising.
- Theodore MacManus of General Motors, branding. Inspiring consumers to identify with their purchase. Projecting a character, e.g. an honest manufacturer and an honest product. Today Cadillac has become a general adjective for things premium / best in their kinds.
- Helen Landsdowne, target advertising. Capitalism awakes to women's control of household wallets. Selling of emotion, imagination, and women's rights movement. Women are in particular sensitive and tend to imitate the rich and famous – birth of paid endorsements.
- Radio: William Paley of CBS, David Sarnoff of NBC. Intrusion of sacred family space & time via the creation of "evening prime time" (and later "morning" and "late night" segments in TV) where the entire household across the nation tune in to a programme. Radio, previously conceived only for the public good (for occupying the public airwaves), became commercial. Paley's offer to provide CBS inhouse programmes for free on the condition of radio stations to also carry sponsored content – parallels the penny paper's approach earlier to acquire mass audience. Limit ads to 10% of airtime to walk the fine line between profit and stirring public rage.
- Emails and "Check In". B.F.Skinner, all behaviours are developed via operant conditioning (reward & punishments). Inconsistent and unpredictable rewards & punishments are more effective at reinforcing a behaviour e.g. gambling, fishing, shopping (variable reinforcement). World's first mass email blast – Thuerk of DEC annoucing a new product launch. Ran into trouble with Pentagon.
- Celebrity Industrial Complex. Human's craving to worship and be connected with the extraordinary (heroes, saints, royalties) is not new; what is new is the construction of entire industry based on such demands. Hence the talk shows, personal interviews – creation of artificial intimacy and illusion of accessibility. Celebrities also awakens to the power of their fame, not merely a byproduct of their professional activities but the very professional capital itself.
- "On whatever platform was to be invented, celebrity would become the attention merchant’s go-to bait, offering a lure infinitely more dependable than any more artfully developed content."
- Instagram, democratization of fame and the "celebrification" of everyday people. For most of human history, the prolifiration of individual likeness was preserved for the extraordinary e.g. the emperor. In the 20th century, Hollywood broadened this priviledge to a cohort of demigods. However, with smart phones, selfie sticks and Instagram, the power is now in the hands of every enterprising Narcissus. Tapping into our instinctual need for admiration from others and bringing it to the logical extreme, to millions of people we won't possibly know.
