The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  Within a year of its founding, Creel’s committee had twenty domestic subdivisions, and reported staff of 150,000; it may have been the fastest-growing government bureaucracy in world history. It did more of everything, faster, channeling the age’s spirit of mass production. The committee produced more posters, speeches, pamphlets, press releases than any other entity. “In addition to newspapers and magazines, county fairs, movies, classrooms, post office walls, churches, synagogues, union halls—virtually every physical interface with the public—was a venue for a CPI message.” The argument for war was made “overwhelmingly powerful by dint of sheer volume, repetition, and ubiquity.” In the burgeoning battle for human attention, Creel’s approach was the equivalent of carpet-bombing.

  Because Creel’s committee kept meticulous records, we have some measure of how many people he reached. The U.S. government printed 75 million pamphlets and books (compare with USA Today, which has a subscription of 1.6 million). It introduced the “Four Minute Man” program, in which ordinary citizens were asked to give pro-war speeches, four minutes in length, at movie theaters while the reels were being changed. The more than 75,000 volunteers delivered a total of 755,190 speeches, reaching a very precisely estimated 134,454,514 people.24

  Under Creel, too, the American government joined forces with the movie business to screen some of the first American propaganda films. A special division of the committee produced features like Pershing’s Crusaders and America’s Answer to the Hun, both of which enjoyed solid ticket sales. Early on, Creel had made clear to the private film industry, just then in the midst of relocating to Hollywood, that any productions “prejudicial” to the war effort would be suppressed. After some prodding, the studios began to see both the patriotic and commercial potential of patriotic “hate” films, like Wolves of Kultur, which came out in fifteen episodes. But the greatest hit of all was The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. Sadly, no prints survive, but we do have this news report on the reaction to the film in the Midwest:

  Fourteen thousand people the largest number that ever saw a motion picture in Omaha in one week saw The Kaiser [The Beast of Berlin] at the Auditorium in that city last week….Wild cheering marked every show when the young captain socked the Kaiser on the jaw. Patriotic societies boosted the picture because of its aid in stirring up the country to war. Street car signs were used; huge street banners swung over the crowds in the downtown district, and a truck paraded the streets with the Kaiser hanging in effigy and a big sign “All pro-Germans will be admitted free.” None availed himself of the invitation.25

  Finally, there was the American version of the giant Kitchener poster that had been so important to the British effort. Lacking a living personification of the cause, however, the Pictorial Arts Division substituted the allegorical Uncle Sam pointing his finger and declaring “I want YOU for the U.S. Army,” for what would surely be the most indelible instance of the recruitment genre.26 In another poster reading “Destroy This Mad Brute,” Germany appears as a giant crazed gorilla; this King Kong avant la lettre, clutches in one arm a beautiful woman naked to the waist—the ravaged Belgium—and in the other hand, a club emblazoned with the word Kultur. The appeal is right to the male amygdala, the brain’s seat of violent emotions, shown in functional MRI to light up at such primal horrors.

  Some 700,000 Americans volunteered for the armed forces, even though, unlike the British, the American army, from nearly the beginning, relied on conscription. Not all of Creel’s success, however, is owing to its superb attention capture and effective messaging. Acting under the authority of the new Espionage and Sedition Acts, federal prosecutors removed, silenced, or scared off the committee’s natural competitors, namely, antiwar dissenters. In the summer of 1918, Eugene Debs, founder of the Socialist Party, tried to expose what he called a campaign to apply “the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition” to the war. At a speech in Canton, Ohio, he told the crowd, “You are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain.” Afterward, the U.S. attorney for Northern Ohio charged him with ten counts of violating the Espionage Act, for which Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. In an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great progressive hero, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Debs’s conviction without dissent.27

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  The outlandish success of the British and American propaganda campaigns left their mark on the rest of the century, setting a new standard for what was possible in manipulating the public to adopt a strong viewpoint about a matter where opinion had been divided before. The effect on those who lived through it seemed to depend very much on something deep within one’s character. Some who found the experience alarming determined never to let such a thing happen again. Others found the wild success of British and American propagandizing nothing less than inspiring.

  Walter Lippmann, a progressive journalist, co-founder of The New Republic, and a power within the Wilson administration, had been among those who pressured Wilson to take the nation to war. During the war he worked at the Creel Committee, and witnessed firsthand its power to whip the country into a fanatical assent. Despite his own initial support for the war, the ease with which the Creel Committee had succeeded turned him into something of a lifelong cynic.

  What Lippmann took from the war—as he explained in his 1922 classic Public Opinion—was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it—the rough “stereotypes” (a word he coined in his book). When it came to the war, he believed that the “consent” of the governed had been, in his phrase, “manufactured.” Hence, as he wrote, “It is no longer possible…to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.”28

  Any communication, Lippmann came to see, is potentially propagandistic, in the sense of propagating a view. For it presents one set of facts, or one perspective, fostering or weakening some “stereotype” held by the mind. It is fair to say, then, that any and all information that one consumes—pays attention to—will have some influence, even if just forcing a reaction. That idea, in turn, has a very radical implication, for it suggests that sometimes we overestimate our own capacity for truly independent thought. In most areas of life, we necessarily rely on others for the presentation of facts and ultimately choose between manufactured alternatives, whether it is our evaluation of a product or a political proposition. And if that is true, in the battle for our attention, there is a particular importance in who gets there first or most often. The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.

  All this, in Lippmann’s view, helped explain why the British and American governments were able, with such surprising speed, to create a “war-will.” They presented a simple, black-and-white stereotype by which to understand the war, used every resource of the state to thoroughly propagate that view, and then prevented any dissenting analysis from reaching anyone with a sympathetic stereotype as to what the war was about. That “public opinion” had been so easy to manufacture left Lippmann an abiding pessimist about democracy’s dependence on it.

  Lippmann’s orientation was shared by prominent progressives in the American judiciary, who, witnessing the rough treatment of dissenters like Debs, began to think twice about what had been done in the name of progressivism. Among the first to express himself was the fam
ed lower-court jurist Judge Learned Hand, who’d been among the few during the war to squash an indictment under the Espionage Act.29 After the War, as prosecutors continued to arrest and jail socialists and anarchists for their views, the most prominent progressives on the Supreme Court, Justices Holmes and Louis Brandeis, underwent a transformation. In a series of dissents and concurrences, renowned for their eloquence, the two outlined the case for stronger speech protections in the Constitution. Justice Brandeis, as if in apology for the Court’s behavior during the war, would in 1927 write a memorable paean to the value of liberty of speech in his famous concurring opinion in Whitney v. California:

  Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.30

  Yet others had nearly the opposite reaction, responding to propaganda’s dramatic success not with dismay but enthusiasm, in the sense of glimpsing a grand opportunity. Among them was the young, Vienna-born Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Residing in the United States, and just twenty-four at the start of the war, he was making his living as a journalist turned press agent. To create publicity for his clients, Bernays was already employing his uncle’s idea of a human nature driven by unconscious desires. (According to legend, Sigmund Freud gave him his General Lectures in exchange for a box of cigars.) During the war Bernays worked, like many journalists, on the Creel Committee, and like Lippmann, he emerged with a sense of the futility of democracy. But unlike Lippmann, Bernays drew from the experience a belief in the necessity of enlightened manipulation. Otherwise, he wrote, the public “could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above.” As he saw it, “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”

  But Bernays’s real passion was for manipulation on behalf of business interests. As he later recalled, “I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.” He would devote the rest of his influential career as the self-described “father of public relations” to the use of propaganda techniques on behalf of commercial clients. In his words, the wartime triumph had “opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.”31 And that “business offers graphic examples of the effect that may be produced upon the public by interested groups.”

  With the government campaigns as proof-of-concept for what a mass advertising campaign might achieve, corporate America soon caught Bernays’s enthusiasm. There was something about the British and American use of advertising for official purposes that cleansed the practice of its tainted reputation. Applied to a high common purpose it could no longer be deemed a mere prop of charlatanry. “Advertising has earned its credentials,” concluded Printer’s Ink, the advertising trade magazine, “as an important implement of war.”32

  The losers of the war were also important witnesses to British and American propaganda efforts, from which they too sought to learn. Erich Ludendorff, a lead German general during the attack on Belgium, reflected that “before the enemy propaganda we were like a rabbit before a snake.” Another German war veteran, while in prison, wrote a tract admiring British propaganda as “marvelous,” praising its simple presentation of “negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood,” thereby allowing “no half-measures which might have given rise to some doubt.” The fan was Adolf Hitler, and given his chance, he thought he could do even better.

  CHAPTER 4

  DEMAND ENGINEERING, SCIENTIFIC ADVERTISING, AND WHAT WOMEN WANT

  All around you people are judging you silently.

  —J. WALTER THOMPSON ADVERTISEMENT, WOODBURY’S BEAUTY PRODUCTS, 1922

  “The advertising man is the enfant terrible of the time, unabashed before the eternities,” wrote S. N. Behrman in The New Republic in 1919. “He does not conceal his awareness of the fact that he is the cornerstone of the most respectable American institutions; the newspapers and magazines depend on him; Literature and Journalism are his hand maidens. Even war needs him, to say nothing of Swift and Company.”1

  What a difference a world war makes.

  In the immediate aftermath of the war, from 1918 to 1920, with advertising redeemed in the public eye and private consumption once again rising, American and European business began to spend wildly on advertising, doubling industry revenue in just two years. By 1930, that spending had increased by a factor of ten; and in the process a truly international industry was born, as the profits and powers derived from using access to the public mind became clear, once and for all.2

  The new confidence of the industry was captured in a 1923 manifesto entitled Scientific Advertising. “The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science,” it boasted. “It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic law.” Nothing, in advertising, was now left to chance: “Every course is charted. The compass of accurate knowledge directs the shortest, safest, cheapest course to any destination.”3

  The New Republic had described the typical advertising man as “young, good-looking, sartorially perfect, with sleek hair and parti-colored shoes.” The author of the Scientific Advertising manifesto, however, was none of these things. He was Claude C. Hopkins, whom we last saw on the shores of Lake Michigan. The onetime preacher and patent medicine scheme-man had been reinvented as a top-drawer adman and the most influential copywriter of his era. Rescued from convalescence by Albert Lasker, the president of Chicago’s Lord & Thomas, Hopkins had adopted his winning patent-medicine techniques to sell everyday products like cigarettes, orange juice, and toothpaste, proving the old patter could work astonishingly well for a broader range of merchandise than anyone might have expected. His success helped transform the copywriter from low-level functionary to the mystical master behind the scenes, the creative wizard who could turn unknown new products into national bestsellers. He had, however, not changed his own presentation, still wearing the round spectacles and the boutonniere, nervously chewing on his licorice root and introducing himself, with his slight lisp, as “Thee Thee Hopkins.” Not quite what one might imagine for the first avatar of Mad Men’s Don Draper, but a force to be reckoned with all the same.4

  Hopkins, now influential, was fond of speaking for the entire industry. “From our desks we sway millions,” he once commented in a speech, explaining what advertising had become.

  We change the currents of trade. We populate new empires, build up new industries and create customs and fashions. We dictate the food that the baby shall eat, the clothes the mother shall wear, the way in which the home shall be furnished….Our very names are unknown. But there is scarcely a home, in city or hamlet, where some human being is not doing what we demand.5

  Hopkins’s gifts notwithstanding, the truly significant actors of the 1920s were not just the admen but the firms themselves, a new generation of large, big-city agencies that grew to maturity as the brokers and engineers of the new attention economy. These new institutions would, in the century to follow, function as private laboratories of attention capture and demand generation, whether it was in C
hicago at Lord & Thomas, New York’s enormous new firms J. Walter Thompson, BBDO, and McCann Erickson, or London-based firms like WS Crawford, and others in Paris and Tokyo. On behalf of their clients, they bought what attention was for sale—mostly the audiences of print media—and determined how to use it for maximum effect.

  Scale and accumulated expertise are what set the new firms apart from their predecessors. Just as the industrial revolution had transformed manufacture, and Ford’s assembly lines pursued a never-ending quest for more efficient methods of mass production, so, too, did the new firms transform the casually intuitive and improvisational approach that had once been advertising into a machine for mass attention capture. Their campaigns were unending and exhaustive, like the British and American propaganda campaigns, which to some extent had solved the already recognized problem of disenchantment. As soon as one approach stopped working, a new one would be launched, in the ideal case stabilizing sales indefinitely.

  The efforts of this industry, moreover, were helping remake the economies of the world’s wealthiest nations. In the United States the average household went from spending a mere $79 per year on durable goods at the turn of the century to $279 by the 1920s ($1,900 and $6,700 in present value). Total consumption expenditures increased by 25 percent from 1923 to 1929. The effect was a transformation into what were later called “consumer societies” as mass production reached nearly every aspect of daily life.6

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  So just what was “scientific advertising,” this buzzword of the day? It was, upon inspection, really just a dressed-up term for a few basic approaches.7 The first was creating the desire for products that otherwise might not exist—then known as “demand engineering.” The second was the relatively new discipline of “branding”—creating loyalty for some maker, like Cadillac or Coca-Cola, by creating the impression, valid or not, that something truly set it apart from others like it. The third technique involved the first deployment of “targeted” advertisements—addressed to the yet mysterious but increasingly sought-after new creature known as the female consumer.