by Tim Wu
But our capacity to ignore is limited by another fact: we are always paying attention to something. If we think of attention as a resource, or even a kind of currency, we must allow that it is always, necessarily, being “spent.” There is no saving it for later. The question is always, what shall I pay attention to? Our brains answer this question with varying degrees of volition, from “shhh—I’m reading this” to letting our minds wander in the direction of whatever might draw it in, whether in the corner of our screen or along some road we are walking. That is where the attention merchant makes his opportunity. But to succeed he must motivate us to withdraw our attention from where it is and surrender it to something else. It needn’t be a thoughtful calculation.9
This puts us in a position to understand the success and significance of the Parisian posters. With their bold and contrasting colors—fields of yellow, red, and blue that tend to spill over onto each other, the posters were practically impossible to ignore. The attention-grabbing effect of bright colors was, at the time, understood only intuitively, but it has since been described by brain scientists. The depiction of exuberant women in some state of undress perhaps requires less comment, but that they appear to be moving is significant. The impression of motion is achieved by painting multiple versions of the same dancer, each in a slightly different attitude, as in a well-known poster for the Folies-Bergère. Taking these in rapidly in sequence creates the impression of flip-book or Mutoscope. In an early ad for Vin Mariani, the woman is almost running off the poster, skirts trailing, as she pours a glass.
But there is more to the posters’ allure. Significantly, they catch the viewer on his way somewhere, the “in between” moments of the day that are in the interstices of our more purposeful mental engagements. That is, times when one might be bored, waiting for a streetcar, or simply strolling around, looking for something to catch the eye. The attentional habit of gazing at the world with nothing better to do has doubtless been a human practice since the species emerged. But its exploitation for commercial purposes is relatively new.
What used to be thought of as the “reptilian core” of our brains—let’s now simply speak of those neural circuits governing behavior that seems reflexive, like flinching at a loud noise—should not be underestimated where the harvesting of attention is concerned; for once you recognize the triggers, you begin to see them everywhere: the flashing signs employed by vendors, those bouncing icons on your computer screen, the little pictures of cats or sexy women attached to Internet links. All of these stimuli set off neural responses that cause us to engage, whether we mean to or not. Flipping through a book of classic posters is instructive, for it is almost a catalogue of attention triggers. Motion, color, critters of every kind, sexualized men and women, babies and monsters seem to work best on us. It was the achievement of the late nineteenth century’s poster pioneers to recognize these responses and put them to profitable use—a lesson that neither advertisers nor their eventual imitators in government would ever forget.
At first the Parisian posters were welcome and admired. At the height of Jules Chéret’s success, the Third Republic awarded him the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian decoration. But he was prolific, and so were his imitators, resulting in an all-out “poster craze” that spread through Europe and the Americas. There were soon dozens of French poster artists, including those now more famous for fine art, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose can-can dancers sitting on the laps of customers are unmistakable.10 At the start of the twentieth century, however, perhaps with foresight, Chéret and other artists began to abandon the business, while Toulouse-Lautrec died from a combination of alcoholism and syphilis. Despite this loss of artistry, the poster craze continued, overspreading the city without limit.
Industries, unlike organisms, have no organic limits on their own growth; they are constantly in search of new markets, or of new ways to exploit old ones more effectively; as Karl Marx unsympathetically observed, they “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”11 Soon, the posters came to define Paris; by one contemporary account, the city was “hardly more than an immense wall of posters scattered from the chimneys down to sidewalks with clusters of squares of paper of all colors and formats, not to mention simple inscriptions.”
Eventually it was too much; the novelty was no more. Here for the first time, but certainly not the last, attention harvesting, taken too far, engendered a vehement social reaction; the proliferation of commercial art and its displacement of other things began to drive people crazy. As the famous adman David Ogilvy once put it, “I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard.”
In Paris the same aesthetic objections were made: critics said that the advertising poster was destroying her reputation as the world’s most beautiful city. Groups including the Society for the Protection of the Landscape and Aesthetics of France, and Les Amis de Paris (Friends of Paris), gained followings by declaring war on the “ugly poster.” Sometimes decrying advertising as “unhygienic” or comparing it to prostitution, they proclaimed their goal to make Paris “more beautiful—materially and morally.”12
Let us pause here to remark a major recurrent dynamic that has shaped the course of attention industries: “the revolt.” Industries may have an inherent tendency to “nestle everywhere,” but when the commodity in question is access to people’s minds, the perpetual quest for growth ensures that forms of backlash, both major and minor, are all but inevitable. The minor version I shall refer to as the “disenchantment effect”; this describes what happens when a once entrancing means of harvesting attention starts to lose its charm. Our ability to ignore things is adaptive; with enough exposure it can make us indifferent to any stimulus, until, say, a poster that was once arresting becomes one we can see through as if it did not exist. It is because of this effect that the attention merchant’s approach is always trending in the direction of going too far, almost to the point, sometimes even reaching it, of causing shock.
But the revolts can also take another, more dramatic form that is central to our story. When audiences begin to believe that they are being ill-used—whether overloaded, fooled, tricked, or purposefully manipulated—the reaction can be severe and long-lasting enough to have serious commercial consequences and require a significant reinvention of approach. Almost like a financial bubble bursting, a mass public revolt can reconfigure the industry or inspire regulatory action. That is what happened in Paris, where the anti-poster movement began to lobby the city to impose restraints on where advertisements might be placed, to impose taxes on posters to limit their spread, and to ban billboards along the train tracks. Since it was France, the issue was always stated as an aesthetic concern, but as so often, behind aesthetic concerns there was something deeper at work. Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent. Perhaps that feeling of violation was what Ogilvy felt when he wrote that “when I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?”
Indeed as we shall see, behind such impassioned backlash is very often an awareness that the exploitation of human attention is in some deeper way the exploitation of our persons. Buffeted by constant intrusions, we sometimes reach the point of feeling we’ve had enough, and that feeling is ultimately one the attention industries cannot ignore. In Paris, the municipal authorities did indeed take aggressive action, restricting the placement of posters, which they came to view as a blight, a weed in need of containment. Those limits still exist and are perhaps one reason visitors continue to find the city beautiful.
* * *
* In technique if not tech
nology, Chéret did have a precedent. In Japan, a few decades earlier, advertisers had begun block-printing large posters featuring beautiful women, albeit more fully clad than their French counterparts. Historians of design have described the influence of Japanese prints on Chéret and his imitators. See Stephen Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History, 2d. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 59–61.
CHAPTER 2
THE ALCHEMIST
With his round spectacles, thin mustache, and balding pate, he must have often gone unnoticed. Except for the fuchsia boutonniere he always wore, he was indifferent to self-adornment—“my limit on shoes is $6.50,” he once allowed.1 Perhaps it was just as well, since he was something of “a timid introvert,” a nervous fellow, to judge by the dried licorice root he chewed on during idle moments. There were few other self-indulgences; “he allowed himself virtually no diversions, no sports, music, politics, books, plays.”2
Claude C. Hopkins was perhaps an unlikely figure to revolutionize the business of harvesting and using human attention, but that is what he did in the early twentieth century, when he became one of advertising’s greatest innovators. Still in its infancy, this new form of communication was, as we have said, the means by which attention could be converted into cash, for Hopkins was a particular master of the art of using attention to create demand for new products. As adman Drayton Bird writes, “If the advertising business ever produced a full-blown genius, Claude Hopkins may have been the man.”3
Hopkins was born in 1866 in a small town in Michigan. His mother was Scottish, his father a newspaperman from a long line of Freewill Baptist ministers. Claude was subject to a strict evangelical upbringing, by the lights of which, as he would write, “seemingly every joy in life was a sin.” When his father abruptly abandoned the family, Hopkins, aged ten, became the sole wage earner, laboring as a boy janitor, delivering papers, and selling silver polish. At age seventeen, he followed family tradition and found work at the church as a religious instructor and un-ordained minister. “I was destined to be a clergyman,” he wrote. “My given names were selected from the Who is Who of clergymen.”
If Hopkins had remained true to this vocation, our story would be different. But in his late teens he began to have a crisis of faith and came to “consider the harmless joys of life which had been barred to me.” He made up his mind to quit the ministry, preaching to his congregation of nearly eight hundred one last sermon, a heretical jeremiad “against hell fire, against infant damnation, against the discipline I knew. It even questioned the story of the creation and of Jonah and the whale.” The congregants left in stunned silence, and the next day his mother disowned him. Hopkins was now irrevocably an outsider, a status that he seemed to relish for reasons perhaps only he knew.
Hopkins left home to seek his fortune, though by his own often unreliable account, he was not after wealth or fame, merely the freedom for what he loved most, which was hard work. “I have always been an addict to work,” he would recall. “I love work as other men love play. It is both my occupation and my recreation.” Indeed after working through a series of menial jobs, Hopkins was hired as a “scheme man” for a company selling carpet sweepers, as writers of early advertisements were known long before copywriting acquired the glamour of a David Ogilvy or Don Draper. The new man’s talent was discovered when he conceived of an advertisement picturing Santa Claus employing the Bissell Carpet Sweeper. “What article can you buy at the same cost that will contribute so much genuine, lasting pleasure and comfort to the recipient as a Bissell Sweeper?4 It will be a constant reminder of the giver for ten years or more.” The fallen preacher had found his life’s true calling.
His early career as a preacher may seem an incongruous footnote to the one that would make his name, but it is in fact quite significant if considered in the larger history of attention capture. Before the nineteenth century, human attention was a largely untapped resource in relation to its eventual commercial and political applications. One reason was the lack of advertising such as we would recognize it today. Yes, there have always been commercial notices and signs; the Greeks and Romans used them to indicate wares for sale, as did merchants in China. Some of the graffiti covering the walls of Pompeii, preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius, turn out to be advertisements for erotic services. But as we shall see, there is a crucial difference between this sort of signage and the industrialized capture of attention.
Attention in our sense of it was not vital for commerce as it has become. In a manner that still holds for some professions, like medicine, or for small businesses, merchants typically relied on a good reputation or a network of custom to attract business. As for advertising, it “was thought to be the work of the vulgarian; it was also thought useless.”5 Nor did the State, with the occasional exception of particular kings and emperors—the first two Napoleons, for instance—find it useful to seek regular access to the public mind. Before the democratic age ushered in by the nineteenth century, most political powers had no need to influence the governed.
This is not to say that there were no regular claimants on human attention, only that commercial and political ones hadn’t yet arrived. When they did, however, they were met by one that had stood for centuries. With its combination of moral injunctions as well as daily and weekly rituals, organized religion had long taken human attention as its essential substrate. This is especially true of monotheisms, whose demands for a strict adherence to the one true God naturally promote an ideal of undivided attention. Among early Christians, for example, total attention to God implied ceaseless prayer. The early Church father Clement of Alexandria wrote of the “Perfect Christian” as one who “prays throughout his entire life, endeavoring by prayer to have fellowship with God.”6 Likewise the desert monastics of the fourth century took as their aim “to maintain there as near as possible a ceaseless vigil of prayer, punctuated only by the minimal interruption for food and sleep.”7
Such an aspiration to monopolize the attention of believers was hardly abandoned after Christianity’s early days. Some 1700 years later, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, prescribed various means for keeping the mind attuned to God, such as the practice of thinking of him immediately upon waking, right before falling asleep, for at least an hour during the day, and before taking any important action. (This discipline shares some similarity with the Jewish practice of offering brachot, or blessings, at various routine moments, such as before eating or drinking, or more exceptional ones, as when thunder is heard, among other practices codified in the Mishnah in the third century CE.)
To be sure, it isn’t as if before the twentieth century everyone was walking around thinking of God all the time. Nevertheless, the Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it. But over the twentieth century, organized religion, which had weathered the doubts raised by the Enlightenment, would prove vulnerable to other claims on and uses for attention. Despite the promise of eternal life, faith in the West declined and has continued to do so, never faster than in the twenty-first century.8 Offering new consolations and strange gods of their own, the commercial rivals for human attention must surely figure into this decline. Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game. But let us not get too far ahead of the story.
If you’d attended the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, you might have spotted him. Far from the Ferris wheel and main concourses, Clark Stanley stood before his booth in an elaborate cowboy outfit, a beaded leather jacket with a colorful bandana, his hair worn long with a prominent goatee and mustache. Behind him, his booth crawled with rattlesnakes. Apparently comfortable with the reptiles, Stanley handled the creatures like pets, petting them and draping them around h
is neck. “I am not the least afraid of being bitten” he reported. “In fact, I have been bitten hundreds of times.”
While spectators watched, Clark would reach into a sack, pluck out a fresh snake, asphyxiate it with ether, and plunge it into a pot of boiling water. As he did so, fatty remnants of the snake rose to the top, which Clark skimmed and, on the spot, mixed into an elixir. The resulting potion he called “Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment” and sold to onlookers. The Snake Oil, Clark boasted, had the power to cure many ailments: it was “good for man and beast.”
Of Stanley’s life we have only his own account, which he called The Life and Adventures of the American Cowboy, by Clark Stanley Better Known as the Rattlesnake King, a slim volume that functioned both as an autobiography and advertising brochure. By his account he was born in central Texas in the 1850s and hit the cattle trail at age fourteen. After more than a decade as a cowboy, he was invited one day to visit the Hopi Indians to witness their secret snake dance. Befriending the medicine man, who was impressed with Stanley’s Colt revolver and “fancy shooting,” he was invited to live with the Indians and learn their secrets, including, most precious of all, “the secret of snake oil” that was entrusted to him alone.
How much of this story is true we may never know, but what we do know for certain is that, at the time, Clark Stanley the Rattlesnake King was among the most successful advertisers in America, forming a part of the growing “patent medicine” industry. His snake oil liniment was only one of dozens of products, like “Lydia Pinkham’s Herb Medicine” or “Kickapoo’s Indian Sagwa,” that were sold through advertising and traveling shows and promised quick cures for nearly any ailment. Yet patent medicine’s most important influence was not on medicine but on advertising. As the industry grew, its pressing advertising needs drew many of the nation’s most creative and talented copywriters, who would come up with some of modern advertising’s most important techniques. It was also through the sale of patent medicine that advertising first proved conclusively its real utility, as a kind of alchemy, an apparently magical means of transforming basically useless substances into commercial gold.