The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  “Here you have the advertiser’s ideal—the family group in its moments of relaxation awaiting your message,” said CBS. “Nothing equal to this has ever been dreamed of by the advertising man.” It is, as we shall see, one thing to sell access to the minds, quite another to predict reliably the audience’s frame of mind; and by dictating the moment of infiltration, radio claimed to do just that. At the time and place of CBS’s choosing, the audience would be “at leisure and their minds receptive.”

  The attention merchant’s business model was always a bit sinister and easily misunderstood. Among those who never fully seemed to grasp it was Paley’s chief rival, radio’s incumbent chieftain, David Sarnoff. Sarnoff ran both NBC and the mighty Radio Corporation of America, corporate owner of the NBC network, as well as America’s leading seller of radio sets, and later televisions.3 He had been in the forefront of establishing radio broadcasting itself (as a means of selling radio sets), and the founding of the National Broadcasting Company in 1926, as a “machinery which will insure a national distribution of national programs, and a wider distribution of programs of the highest quality.”*3

  From his palatial offices atop New York’s Rockefeller Center, Sarnoff ruled unchallenged, a daunting, if vain and brutal, figure. He did truly have a knack for seeing around the corner, even if he was in the habit of falsifying documents after the fact so as to enhance his reputation for precognition. But for a self-proclaimed visionary, he certainly had his blind spots. Perhaps because of his empire’s stake in selling the hardware, he never seemed either to fully grasp or appreciate NBC’s true mission as an attention merchant. Perhaps he simply didn’t like the association with advertising and its hucksters. “We’re the pipes,” Sarnoff liked to tell his associates, sounding like an industrialist of a previous generation. His success in broadcasting, though considerable, was never premised on catering to audiences, but rather on domination pursued by overwhelming force, lobbying for helpful laws or imposing tough technical standards on affiliates, with the ultimate aim of burying or buying his competitors. As historian David Halberstam put it, “He was not a man of entertainment, he was instead a poet of technology, he understood and loved the instruments themselves, genuinely loved touching them, loved the smell and language of the lab.” One might add, he loved the game of war and of building empire.

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  The contrast between Paley and Sarnoff is deeper and more interesting than it may first appear. Both men were Russian Jews, though from different generations. Sarnoff, schooled in a Minsk yeshiva to be a Talmudic scholar, was brought to America a penniless immigrant; he grew into a gruff and domineering self-made man. “There was no mistaking what David Sarnoff wanted,” said longtime NBC executive David Adams. “There was no bullshit.” Paley, by contrast, had acquired position, together with polish, as a birthright. Yet he was no snob, quite at ease with admen, entertainers, and Protestants, three groups whom Sarnoff held in varying degrees of contempt. Compared with Sarnoff’s commands, Paley’s were more like agreeable offers.

  Paley was well aware of his rival; and in retrospect, everything he and CBS did was, in one way or another, intended to exploit David Sarnoff’s weaknesses. When it came to “talent,” for example, Sarnoff was indifferent or hostile to the entertainers who performed on his network. He wouldn’t even listen to Amos ’n’ Andy, his most successful program. An almost comically serious person, he hated comedians, and once said, “If comedy is the center of NBC’s activities, then maybe I had better quit.”

  Paley, meanwhile, loved to flatter and mingle with stars of both Hollywood and CBS. A natural programmer, he had a knack for guessing which entertainers had the ineffable charm to hook an audience, not just once but to make them tune in compulsively. “There were other men who were good businessmen,” writes Halberstam, “and others who were deft salesmen, but the feel for talent, that was something else, and it was essential in so public and volatile a profession as broadcasting.” Paley’s ear was good enough to notice talent from the briefest exposure, so he was always ahead of everyone else. “He could, in 1931, go on a shipboard cruise and by chance hear the records of a then unknown singer and know instantly that the singer was big, very big, and send back a cable telling his subordinates to sign Bing Crosby immediately.” To be fair, he didn’t place that great a bet: Crosby was given the unenviable task of running opposite Amos ’n’ Andy.

  Not every contrast with Sarnoff worked to Paley’s advantage. Unlike his rival or early broadcasting’s other important figures, Paley, as mentioned, had no feel for technology, whose future he could barely see into the following week. He never, for instance, understood the potential of FM radio, seeing it merely as a threat to AM. And when it came to television, his myopia would prove prodigious. Seeing the early screens, he assumed they would remain too small to attract home consumers. By the mid-1930s, with television already showing serious potential in Europe, Paley shook his head and succeeded in personally lobbying the FCC to slow it down or block it. Frank Stanton, longtime CBS executive, explained that “Bill did not want television, for he thought it would hurt radio.” At the time, Paley “didn’t see any profit in TV at all.”

  By the early 1930s Paley’s CBS had reached profitability, and was in a position to take a real run at NBC’s dominance. He had earlier hired Edward Bernays, author of Propaganda, as an adviser. Bernays suggested that CBS distinguish itself from NBC by emphasizing the superior quality of its programming—the theory of the “Tiffany Network” was thus born—and in that way exploit Sarnoff’s weakness in matters of taste.4 Whether or not the idea was truly Bernays’s—one must always ask—as a strategy it served many goals at once.

  The race between the penny papers in the 1830s may have given the impression that, among attention merchants, the race always goes to the most lurid and shocking. That does tend to be true over the short term, but over longer spans of time, the matter is more complex. The most successful know how to bear downwind, to get moving, but also the delicate art of bearing back upwind to sustain the audience; a continual diet of the purely sensational wears audiences out, makes them seek some repose. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, for example, both beat out their rivals in the late nineteenth century not by being more sensational, but less, while steering shy of being tedious most of the time. Similarly, the Tiffany strategy was aimed for the network to sustain itself by entering the ranks of respectability.

  A second advantage of the strategy was in appeasing progressive critics, who argued, with some reason, that radio, once imagined as a public service, had been hijacked by commercial interests. Broadcast radio was, in its early days, thought of as a miracle of science, a sacred and blessed realm that ought be free from commercial intrusion. It was to be for the education, entertainment, and enlightenment of the public, and should always deliver “the best of everything” as John Reith of the BBC put it. But over the late 1920s and early 1930s the commercial radio network, embodied by NBC and CBS, had pulled radio very far from that original conception, and resistance was growing. Paley wisely understood that if CBS was going to profane the sacred, it had better do it well. The trick was getting the programming just right.*4

  Programming—the blending of various forms of content to maximize audiences and thereby the value of what networks could sell to advertisers—turned out to be as much an art as a science. The radio networks had originally seen themselves more like carriers of whatever the commercial sponsors wished to present, but Paley took a more active role as the master mixologist, trying to optimize the lineup. Having done a turn in advertising as a young man, he understood the challenge and proved a born talent. He had “a gift of the gods, an ear totally pure.” And like some prodigal sons, the Prince Hal type, once vested with real responsibility he would surprise everyone, probably even himself. For as Halberstam writes, “He was a sensualist, who unlike most sensualists, had intense inner discipline.”5

  To his lasting credit, over the 1930s, Paley went very far tow
ard showing that network radio could use its economies of scale to do great things besides making money. The total commercialization of broadcasting, as many scholars have opined, was neither inevitable nor salutary; and it was in large measure Paley’s knack for pursuing it with real flair that allowed it to happen without further public outcry. Among his offerings were shows that managed to be both popular and highbrow, a blend matched at the time only by Britain’s BBC, and since then unmatched on American airwaves until the founding of National Public Radio in the 1970s. In an early, well-publicized coup, Paley signed the New York Philharmonic to a series of unsponsored concerts. He also signed off on a show named the Columbia Workshop for experimental drama, which featured avant-garde verse plays by well-regarded poets like W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, and others.

  In 1938, Paley put on the air a young New York director and actor named Orson Welles. Delighting both critics and audiences, Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air presented new takes on classics, like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which Welles reimagined as a commentary on the rise of fascism. It was on the same program that Welles would pull his legendary War of the Worlds prank. Finding H. G. Wells’s novel ill-suited to a traditional performance, Welles and his producer, the actor John Houseman, presented it as a series of dramatized news bulletins, describing an ongoing alien invasion of the United States. It famously caused some panic among listeners who missed the show’s disclaimers.*5

  Paley’s programming was, of course, not all so elevated. He knew intuitively how to mix and match high and low, balancing the demands of prestige with those of keeping people awake. Ultimately, it was his sponsored content mainly that filled in the low end and the middle. Seeing that comedians went over well on radio, Paley found Jack Benny, who became “Your Canada Dry Humorist,” and also signed the couple George Burns and Gracie Allen. For the female listener (daytime radio), CBS aired a show named The Voice of Experience, essentially an advice program, sponsored by Kreml medicinal products. When soap operas became a hit on NBC, CBS profitably programmed half a dozen of its own, including Just Plain Bill and Big Sister, each with a sponsor like Wonder Bread or Rinso laundry soap.

  Knowing how to keep the pot simmering without boiling over in public protest, Paley proactively set limits on CBS’s advertising; among them, he cut its share of airtime to 10 percent and banned commercials considered offensive. At the risk of giving him too much credit, one could say that such policies not only kept critics at bay but also showed a shrewd awareness of the attention merchant’s eternal dilemma: too little advertising and the business can’t grow; too much and the listener grows resentful and tunes out.

  Bernays also convinced Paley that nothing would burnish the CBS brand so much as building its reputation for news coverage. The old propagandist’s instinct was shrewd indeed. For news would give Paley license to brag to Congress how diligently CBS was covering public affairs, while at the same time having news coverage made it clear that the network had the power to favor or ignore individual politicians, making CBS a political force to be reckoned with. Ultimately CBS created what was the nation’s first broadcast news service to compete credibly with print. Radio news had never really been more than a gesture before the mid-1930s; but on the recommendation of Bernays, Paley hired Ed Klauber, former city editor at The New York Times, giving him all the resources he asked for. Klauber set high standards and made radio news, and the CBS brand in particular, respected. CBS also became the first network to hire its own reporters—hundreds of them. Paley’s commitment revealed either blind luck or prescience, for as the 1930s wore on, and Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini came to power, the news, always a money loser, would suddenly begin drawing millions of listeners.*6

  Meanwhile, with its head start and double-barreled broadcasting, NBC would remain ascendant for most of the 1930s. Sarnoff would continue to imagine he had one further advantage, and that was Paley himself, or at least his bon vivant side. In a way that seems strange in our age of twenty-four-hour days and driven CEOs, Paley never let his work get in the way of his truest passion, living the good life. In the early 1930s, he pursued Dorothy Hart, a beautiful socialite, married at the time to John Randolph Hearst, son of the newspaper publisher. After persuading her to divorce Hearst, Paley and Hart were married and became, as one writer put it, “the golden couple on the town.”6 They made themselves regulars at hot spots like New York’s 21 Club, where he and other “socialites, financiers, actors, showgirls, singers, writers, sportsmen and tycoons…were united in pursuit of pleasure.” Yet Paley managed to do these things while building a profitable network. In some ways, then, they were not merely a distraction but part of the image of easy refinement he meant to project for the business.

  Sarnoff, meanwhile, remained as dogged as ever. His wife, Lizette, would see few nights on the town, spending most with him at home, as sounding board for his ideas. Sanorff’s idea of leisure was limited to classical music—he was too serious about everything to stand for light entertainment. His love of winning would never wane. If Paley, with his easy living, was still able to keep up, it was because of a certain imprecision in the measurement of radio audiences, which was somewhat like guesswork. Unfortunately for him there would soon be a new way of keeping score.

  Late in 1936, an MIT professor named Robert Elder presented a new invention at a conference held in the ballroom of the Yale Club of New York. He called it the “Audimeter” and claimed that it could scientifically measure human attention, something no one had done before. The crude prototype had two rolls of paper in a reel-to-reel arrangement and was attached to a radio. When the radio was on, a stylus scratched a line onto the slowly turning scroll, indicating over time which stations the radio had been tuned to, and for how long.7

  At this moment the penetration of broadcasts was a matter of guesswork, and relative standing of competitors in radio was a matter of little solid evidence. In the absence of even remotely scientific metrics, listeners were sometimes canvassed by phone during the evening hours or asked on air to mail in a postcard to receive some small gift—all this to get some idea of how many had heard the commercials. The success of shows like Amos ’n’ Andy and its effect on the sales of Pepsodent toothpaste made some difference, of course. It was something else, however, to prove that these were no fluke but something worth paying for.

  Among those listening in the ballroom was one man for whom the presentation was nothing short of electrifying. Arthur Charles Nielsen, grandfather of today’s data geeks, then ran a market research company that had created the “Nielsen Drug Index” and the “Nielsen Food Index.” Favoring direct reporting, he hated any kind of data collection in which “human elements” might influence results. Consequently, he had a low opinion of the various, early means of measuring radio audiences, like the Hooper Ratings, dominant over the 1930s, that depended on telephone polling. He wanted harder metrics: “If you can put a number on it,” Nielsen was said to say, “then you know something.”

  Nielsen bought out Elder and his partner, Louis Woodruff, and six years later he had developed a working prototype of his own “black box”; once installed in the home of a family (who were paid for their trouble), it would measure exactly what they were tuning in to. One by one, Nielson sent out his black boxes (which came to be called “people meters”), each one like a nerve ending into the body public, slowly creating a vast network that would tell him just how Americans were spending their evening hours. Thus were modern ratings born, becoming in the words of one expert “a feedback mechanism to the industry the same way that the human nervous system is to the human body.” If the United States would now have a nervous system collecting information on the apportionment of attention, Nielsen would be its brain.

  The first Nielsen ratings for radio would not be released until 1947. But even in its early form, quantitative measure of attention capture allowed the broadcaster to put a more accurate value on the airtime he was selling; and this, inevitably, began to transform the busine
ss. It would, of course, be a mixed blessing, as we will recognize, we who sometimes allow numbers—from stock prices to political polls to batting averages—a disproportionate influence on our decision making. Indeed, Professor Elder, inventor of the Audimeter, would live to lament the effect. Broadcasting, he later said, “suffers greatly from the misuse of the [ratings], and for that reason I am not too happy about my part in getting it started.”8

  It is interesting to speculate how the intervening history of the medium might have been different had Nielsen ratings existed when, for example, Bill Paley made his improbable bet on broadcast news, positioning CBS to become its leader in that market in the crucial years of the war. Given the successful history of print news—even of more recently established publications, like Time—the viability of broadcast journalism ought to have been somewhat predictable. Yet from the beginning, the medium always seemed so much more naturally suited to entertainment than news*7 that only in the late 1930s would Paley and others realize certainly what a powerful attraction the rush of world events could be, provided they were presented in the right way. The vital difference, it would turn out, was personality, a presenter who was a star in his own right.

  In 1937, Paley had sent a twenty-nine-year-old CBS employee named Edward R. Murrow to Europe. As a director of operations, his job was to collect suitable material from news outlets there for rebroadcast in the United States. When, however, Hitler invaded Austria, Murrow was pressed into service as a reporter. At this he proved a natural, becoming the first bona fide star of broadcast news. He had an almost constitutionally serious disposition and his deep voice seemed to match the gravity of the events. He was, as Paley would later say, “the right man in the right place.”