Reading Journal: The Attention Merchants

Published: 01 May 2022
19 mins read

Tim Wu is a Law professor at the Columbia Law School and an official in the Biden White House in charge of Technology and Competition policies. Many know him for coining the term “net neutrality”. Occasionally, he contributes opinion pieces to the New York Times; many of which I am a huge fan of. His articles are always enlightening and concisely written hence why I was encouraged to get this book.

“The Attention Merchant” is about the business model of big tech, in particular the advertising duopoly Facebook and Google, and the methods they employ in harvesting our attentions for advertising revenue. It is a superbly researched work and goes into depth on the history of “attention merchants”. As we will discover, the business model of attention capture has had a long history and Google and Facebook are certainly not the first. Despite a constantly evolving medium, the business model of attention capture has never fundamentally changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your time.

In this decade of great technological advancement, more and more companies are vying for our precious attention. In this scramble to get into our heads, we are being pulled in every direction without any respite where we can reserve our attention for ourselves.

For how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. […] At the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to.

In this cacophony we’ve find ourselves in, it is worth asking the question: “Are the services they provide truly free?”

What are the costs to a society of an entire population conditioned to spend so much of their waking lives not in concentration and focus but rather in fragmentary awareness and subject to constant interruption?

The First Attention Merchants

Newspaper

  • What lies at the heart of advertising is “driving purchase decisions”. At the plateau of innovation, most product and services are fundamentally similar, what drives sales number is marketing and salesmanship.
    • Most commodities are advertised not by their function, but by establishing a warm association with the product. What does buying this product say about you?
    • Are you a happier person just by drinking Coca-Cola? Are you more masculine by preferring certain brand of beer or whiskey? Are you seen as a more productive person with a cup of coffee in your hand? Not really, but companies spend millions of dollars painting these pictures. Repeating it ad nauseum until life imitate art, and art imitate life.
  • The first significant attention merchant is a fellow by the name of Benjamin H. Day. He founded a penny press called the New York Suns in 1833. At the time, most papers cost around 6-cents. Day’s idea was to sell a paper for 1 penny, essentially selling at a loss…
    • Instead, he relied on selling spots on the paper for ads. In other words, he was selling the attention of his audience to turn a profit
    • At the time, advertisements weren’t meant to be persuasive. They were mostly informational (what we call classifieds). Day’s idea was to change all of that
  • In 1833, New York’s leading paper “The Morning Courier” and “New York Enquirer” had a daily circulation of around ~2600. By the end of 1834, Day’s “The New York Sun” exploded in growth and had claimed ~5000 readers a day.

Quack Medicine

  • The sale of quackery medicine depends entirely on salesmanship and marketing.
  • The saying: “snake oil salesmen” has its history from Chinese migrant workers in California. The workers would extract oil from water snakes which are rich in omega-3 acids and had anti-inflammation properties. Over time, snake oil became bastardized and marketed as a miracle medicine that cured everything (See Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment)
  • Aside from snake oil, there were tons of other miracle potions and elixirs on the market. This was before the establishment of the FDA, hence the huge market for quackery.
  • We may see these scams as the gullibility of another age, until we stop to reflect that the same techniques are used today. Some are actually substantiated by research, others purely pseudo-science. Often, the data is cherry-picked and results p-hacked. Most of us don’t have the time to read academic journal articles on neuroscience and biology just to be an “informed consumers” so we outsource this responsibility to influencers and scientists

Lotions that promise youthfulness, exotic ingredients like antioxidants, amino acids, miracle fruits like pomegranate and acai berry, extracted ketones, biofactors, CBD oil, triple reverse osmosis water, gold-plated HDMI cables […] Essence of coconut, or rosemary extracts

The Country Needs YOU

  • The art of advertising, also known as “propaganda”, really had its renaissance during the First World War. Both are methods used to “propagate” certain messages.
    • The British went from having a 200,000 men troop to millions that would match the supreme land power that is Germany.
    • The US went from having an absolute insistence on neutrality (for it shares no common interest and is not tied up with the affairs of the old world), to over 4 million men serving in a senseless war
  • The Creel Committee (also known as the Committee on Public Information) was established purely for war time propaganda and to arouse pro-war sentiments. Within a year of its founding, it had a reported staff of 150,000.
  • Walter Lippman, who worked at the Creel Committee saw first-hand its power to influence the country into a fanatical assent. He, among many other journalist who worked at the committee, became cynical after the war. Lippman wrote the now famous critique of democracy: “Public Opinion”; within which he could coin the term “stereotype”. The central thesis being that a well-informed citizenry is a requisite to a healthy functioning democracy. However, public opinion is all too easy to influence. Consent can be manufactured, public opinion manipulated and bent, just like what happened during the first world war.

For the real world is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.

We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it. - Walter Lippmann

  • We also have the tendency to overestimate our capacity for independent thought. Jacques Ellul argued that its the intellectuals who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda who are in fact most easy to manipulate. The disconnected - rural dwellers living in the middle of nowhere or urban poors - are actually more immune to propaganda

A Master Class in Propaganda

  • A German veteran was fascinated by the effectiveness of British Propaganda. He praised it as marvelous for its simplicity in presentation of “negative and positive, notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood”. Living no room for nuance that would given rise to doubt. The veteran was Adolf Hitler, and he thought he could do even better given his chance.

    • In Mein Kampf, he suggests that propaganda needs to be like advertising and seek to first attract attention
    • Afterwards, there must be a constant repetition of simple ideas; imprinting it into the public conscious. They key words being: “simple” and “repetition”
      • Since everything can be ignored, and forgetfulness is great, a message must be imprinted until it dwells within our subconsciousness
      • Simplicity is key. For propaganda to be effective, the message must be limited to very few points. Nuance was nonsense; complexity was a risk

“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 important into the masses’ field of vision.” - Adolf Hitler

  • Hitler was a demagogue in the highest order. He was a master in manipulating public opinion and stirring up assent. His speeches had widely been considered to be “mesmerizing”, and “intoxicating”.

    • He would start his speech with a long silence, broken by a soft, intimate tone filled with pain and vulnerability. Like a man who had seen too much. He would then slowly build up pace and intensity; speaking with an intense, emotionally-charged style with unwavering certainty until reaching the climax with a “rhapsody of hysteria”, ending by leading his audience into a rousing chant
    • During a speech he gave in February of 1920 titled “Why We Are Anti-Semites”, his 2-hour speech was interrupted 58 times by wild cheering

“Hitler responds to the vibration of the human heart with the delicacy of a seismograph […] enabling him, with a certainty with which no conscious gift could endow him, to act a a loudspeaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the least permissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation”

Demand Engineering. Art of Advertising

No one is born wanting a 4K TV.

  • The most valuable function of advertising is the creation of demand that would not have otherwise existed. Within the advertising industry, human psychology is an open-book
  • The practice of targeted advertising came into being with Jonathan Robbin’s PRIZM system: “Potential Ratings in ZIP Markets” in the 1960s. Using the relatively new “Zone Improvement Plan”, Robbins delineated the US population into 40 categories. Here are some example categories, or clusters:
    • “Young Influential”: “young, upwardly mobile singles and dual career couples. Found in the inner ring suburb of major cities. Don’t care about good schools, because they don’t have children. They want mall with sushi bar, gourmet cookie shops, travel agency and psychotherapy centers”
    • “Bohemian Mix”: “an eclectic melange of never-married and divorced singles, young Turks and older professionals, blacks and whites who held benefit dances for the Sandinistas, ….”
    • Young Suburbia, Shotguns & Pickups, Gold Coasts, etc.
    • PRIZM is still in use today and now has more than 60 clusters

Marlboro

  • The Marlboro cigarette was originally marketed to women in the 1920s; “mild as May” was the original slogan. Many war veterans only smoked cigar as many cigarette was thought to be for women. How did we go from that to mysterious cowboys within the span of 3 decades? In order to portray a sense of masculinity, they chose the images of cowboys.
    • The Economist Would later describe a Marlboro Man as “A mysterious wanderer, a modern Odysseus journeying who knew where […] running his cattle and closely encountering wild white horses: alone save for that manly cigarette lodged in his thin, grim lips. Flinty and unconcerned, he would light the next smoke from a flaming stick plunged into his campfire.”
    • Clint Eastwood seemed to embody this perfectly. Was he being paid to smoke on the big screen? Or was the advertised image already engraved into the public conscious? And it was merely “art imitating life”?

Pepsi

  • Another interesting story came from the soft-drink industry. Since its founding, competing with Coca-Cola was seen as a futile undertaking.
  • Somehow, Coca-Cola not only convinced the public that it is the superior choice, but also the only choice. In economics lingo, Coca-Cola had a low “brand-elasticity”, customers are royal and will not be easily swayed. Coca-Cola associated itself with everything American. Wholesome and Jovial. It even associated itself with Santa Claus
  • On the other hand, Pepsi was originally sold as a patent medicine. The “healthy” cola. The name originated from the symptom it’s meant to treat: dyspepsia, or indigestion. It was marketed as the “cheaper” cola, catering to the poor and disenfranchised. Unsurprisingly, it was being outsold by Coke 6 to 1.
  • Riding the so social movement in the 1960s, it launched an absolutely brilliant ad campaign. Instead of focusing on the cola itself, the strategy was to focus on the image of people who bought it
    • “The Pepsi Generation” was a generation of young, rebellious, beautiful people who would not bend to dogma of the old age. Pictures of vitality, fun-loving rebels. Symbols of individualism.
    • The message was that consuming the product somehow made you into what you wanted to be
  • By the end of the decade, it had nearly caught up - although never fully overtook - Coca-Cola

Prime Time - TV and Radio

  • Originally, the airspace of radio was meant to be sacred and left for important broadcasts, not to be polluted with advertising. That slowly changed over the decades. In similar vein, television crept into our once sacred and private family dinner time.
  • Elvis Presley’s first appearance on television, on the CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show, had a shocking 82.6% share of viewers (out of a nation with half the population today) which has never been equaled or beaten.
  • The term “soap opera” was coined because the never-ending drama “As the World Turns” on CBS was sponsored by Procter & Gamble for many decades
  • Overtime, popular TV shows went from game shows and drama to reality TV.
    • MTV had steady growth in the 90s but its revenue is beginning to taper off. In order to preserve their audience, they had to try something new. The executives were at first reluctant: “We get our music videos for free, and now we’re going to spend $300,000 for half an hour of television?”
    • A middle ground was reached. Rather than hiring well-known actors and having a high production budget, they decided to get a whole bunch of twenty-year old aspiring artists, throw them into the same household, and turn on the camera. The price was right at around $1,400 per cast member
  • Reality shows are so cheap to produce, that no idea was seemed too ridiculous to try. Thus came the boon of Reality TV in the early 2000s. Survivors, Big Brother, The Apprentice, Real Housewives, Jersey Shores, and the list goes on…

Birth of The Internet

Some Interesting Facts

  • In the 1990s and early 2000s, AOL charged $9.95 a month for up to 5 hours of internet usage, $3.50 for every additional hour. This gives the expected usage level and attraction at the time
  • The famous arcade game “space invader” was created by Tomohiro Nishikado when he was asked by his boss to create a Japanese version of the American game “Breakout”. It’s original theme was land warfare with tanks and artillery units, but was later changed to a space theme.
  • Toru Iwatani, while working at Namco, wanted to create a game more suited to both genders. Arcade was “a playground for boys. It was dirty and smelly”. To include female players, he wanted to create something endearing and charming that a couple would enjoy. His original concept revolves around eating because he noticed his girlfriend liked desserts. Thus Pac-Man was born
    • The original name was “Pakku Man”, Pakku being the onomatopoeia of eating. In the US, it became Puck Man and then finally Pac-Man

Google and Facebook

  • The two original founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, described in their seminal paper on Google’s search algorithm “Page Rank” their attitude towards advertising: “Search engine bias is particularly insidious, it is difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines”. Mixed incentive can be troubling. For this reason, the pair believed in absolute transparency. They want to find a better way to advertise or perhaps not rely on advertising at all; that was the Google motto:

Google’s unspoken motto has always been: “We do it better”; its founding culture a radical meritocracy, where brilliant code and ingenious system design count above all.

  • Thus was born “AdWords”. Think of it as surgical strike rather than carpet bombing. Leveraging user data, Google is able to read your mind and show you that one precise ad that you are interested in

As soon as AdWords launched, it “accelerated past the outer moons of Jupiter on its way to some distant galaxy made entirely of money” - Douglas Edwards

  • In addition, using Google’s data analytics, advertisers could see exactly where they were paying for. Even today, roughly 80% of Google’s revenue (and over 90% of profit) comes from Google’s ad division.
  • Facebook was born out of the dorms of Harvard. At first, Mark Zuckerberg had the idea of putting student’s face together and having people vote which is more attractive. He called it “Facemash”, a Harvard-only version of “Hot or Not”. Later on it became a social media website for college campuses, and it spread like wild fire. There are several factors that contributed to its early success:
    • It had a brilliant market fit by targeting college campuses
    • It dodged a bullet by avoiding being cast as a dating site. Social bonds created by dating are inherently more fragile
    • It’s competitors all had their own issues:
      • MySpace was too casual about verifying user identity, it also gave user full freedom to customize their pages. Overtime it became a mess of flashing ads, scams, and scantily clad women. “It all began to look and feel a lot like Times Square circa 1977: squalid and a little dangerous”
      • Friendster was the most promising competitor. However, it had trouble maintaining its software. Simply put, Facebook was able to hire better programmers and engineers. Eventually Friendster collapsed under its own weight.
  • Facebook not only had data, it had actual, real life user data. People were willing to put their real name, preferences, profile pictures, all available online. Nevertheless, Google’s advertising proved to be much more effective despite Facebook getting twice the pageviews.
    • Google’s user were very close to the final stage of making a purchase, whereas Facebook’s user were at best during the awareness stage

  • Bill Gates scored 1590/1600 on his SAT whereas Zuckerberg scored a perfect 1600. Gates apparently asked a girl on their first date her SAT score.

  • Instagram was purchased by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion, it didn’t even have a business plan at the time of its purchase. Within the span of two years, it went from having 30 million users in 2013 to 400 million users in 2015

Race To the Bottom

  • Over time, the exercise of capturing attention became perverse and vapid. Websites began capturing attention for the sake of attention, appealing to our basest human impulses of voyeurism and titillation. The rise of clickbait can be effectively illustrated by these BuzzFeed article titles:
    • “Which Ousted Arab Spring Ruler Are You?”
    • “You Might Be Cleaning Your Penis Wrong”
    • “29 Cats Who Failed So Hard They Won”
  • Many of these articles are just a series of gifs with a few sentences interspersed throughout. BuzzFeed, along with similar sites, had optimized for attention, rather than any meaningful communication. Mark Manson describes the state of the web in 2010s:

Last week, I logged onto Facebook to see a story about a man who got drunk, cut off his friend’s penis and then fed it to a dog. This was followed by a story of a 100-year-old woman who had never seen the ocean before. Then eight ways I can totally know I’m a 90’s kid. Then 11 steps to make me a “smarter Black Friday Shopper,” an oxymoron if I ever saw one.

This is life now: one constant, never-ending stream of non sequiturs and self-referential garbage that passes in through our eyes and out of our brains at the speed of a touchscreen

  • This is the state we find ourselves in. Constantly being fed commercial junk. We become scatter-minded not from our lack of drive, but from “the imperative of one peculiar kind of commercial enterprise that is not even particularly profitable much of the time”

Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, attention merchants have infiltrated to every corner of our lives. According to American pragmatist William James: “At the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to.”

If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it so cheaply and unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of The very experience of living.

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