The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  With the potential dollar value of television’s attention harvest becoming so obvious, any pretenses to a higher purpose that broadcasting once had were eroding quickly. Now it was clear, as an economist put it, that “programs are scheduled interruptions of marketing bulletins.” The trend was exacerbated by another increased quantification. The networks began to consider audience attention their “inventory,” which was sold using metrics like “gross rating points” or GRP, a formula that estimated the likelihood of people seeing the advertising at least once (the cumulative audience), and the frequency with which the advertising played. On popular prime-time television, all but the highest commercial bidders—America’s largest corporations—were priced out of each time slot.

  Moreover, as compared with radio or print, there was on television a larger disparity in profit between the “winner” and “loser” of each time slot. Even the cheapest television programs cost far more to make than a radio show, meaning some ratings minimum was needed just to cover costs. The ratings winner, was able, moreover, to charge a premium for its advertising slots. This made the pressure to win even more intense, and also meant that content could not linger to evolve, as it might on radio or in a magazine—it had to pull in its audience or face cancellation.

  Much of the broadcast schedule was simply too valuable to be left to chance. Experimenting with a few stations and high ideals might have their place when sponsorships were the norm, when nothing could be accurately measured, and all was a matter of feel, but now, by the late 1950s, every moment of what was called prime time had both fixed costs and a revenue potential to be met or brutally aspired to. Paley, as we’ve said, liked to win, and CBS did it best. In 1953, the television network would make its first profit; its ratings dominance, once established in 1955, would hold until 1976.30 Given the nature of the contest, such consistency bears special remark.

  What we learn about Paley from this period is, in fact, slightly ambiguous. The most straightforward theory is that, in the end, his competitive instincts ruled. The game of television was audience aggregation, and so that is the game he played to win. He was, therefore, a merchant of attention in the most undiluted sense, not unlike Benjamin Day of the New York Sun, who gave audiences exactly what he could tell they wanted. Unlike others, Paley had no real designs to manipulate or enlighten, unless that might improve ratings. His only aim was to harvest as much of his product as he could, in as pure a form as he could, for sale to the highest bidder. As David Halberstam suggested, he “was totally without sentiment: he knew what was good and would sell, what was bad and would sell, and what was good and would not sell, and he never confused one with another.”31

  Another, not entirely inconsistent, view sees Paley as someone who had higher aspirations, who wanted television to be appealing and worthy, but found himself taken captive by a system he helped make. He had, at times, shown undeniably high ideals, and yet, caught in the competition with NBC, it was as if he lost control over his own creation, which took on a will of its own. “Bill Paley had invented the system,” wrote one observer, “but now the system was in the process of swallowing him up.” The attention merchant faces a constant pressure to build its audiences, and the first casualty is always anything that attracts less than the largest viewership (many believe this is why the first true golden age of television only came in the 2000s, after the rise of commercial-free models). Fred Friendly, who was at CBS for the whole period, took this more charitable view. For Paley and other CBS executives “looked on while programs proliferated which assaulted their sense of taste, and even decency; they seemed incapable of stopping the inexorable flight from quality.”32

  Incapable, or helpless: countless media scholars have pointed out that, as the 1950s progressed, this approach ceded ever more programming control to Arthur Nielsen. Whether they saw it or not, what Paley and Weaver—programming geniuses both—had ultimately wrought was a system for capturing more attention than ever commercially amassed before. Once that system existed, the logic of capitalism, though not decency, dictated it could be used for only one purpose: to make as much money as could be made. That the substrate for this process was the conscious hours of millions of Americans was hardly CBS’s or NBC’s problem. In a free society, you are free to do things that aren’t good for you, whether it be smoke, drink sugary drinks, or watch game shows. Thanks to the erosion of the public interest model, broadcasters were free to air what suited them. But there are always consequences, and broadcasting executives had no luxury of foresight. As David Halberstam writes, “Whereas at the turn of the century, only an occasional door-to-door salesman visited the American home, by the middle of the century a ceaseless stream of the most subtle electronic impulses created by the nation’s most richly rewarded hucksters was beamed into this new marketplace, relentlessly selling not just the American dream but an endless series of material products through whose purchase that dream might be more quickly achieved.” In this way, for the first time, to be at home and awake was, for most Americans, to be sold something.

  On June 5, 1955, a Tuesday, at 10 p.m., Fred Friendly and Ed Murrow sat and watched CBS’s new show, The $64,000 Question, which ran just before their program See It Now. In the middle of the show, Murrow said, “Fritzo—how long do you think we’ll stay in this time period?”33

  It wasn’t long. Later that year, the sponsor, Alcoa, dropped See It Now, telling CBS it wanted something different, “perhaps fictional, or ‘like the Ed Sullivan program.’ ” Paley approached Murrow with the idea of retiring See It Now from its weekly slot, and making it an occasional special. Paley then sold the now vacant slot to the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, which wanted to run a quiz show called Do You Trust Your Wife? In 1958, See It Now was canceled for good; despite spectacular ratings by present standards, it was simply no match for the game shows or a new fad, westerns like Gunsmoke. Jack Gould at the The New York Times wrote, “An era in television ended unexpectedly last night,” and attributed it to a “tighter TV economy.”34 A columnist for the New York Herald Tribune wrote, “The fact that CBS cannot afford [See It Now] but can afford Beat the Clock is shocking.”35

  Later in 1958, Murrow would deliver his lament for what he felt had befallen television over the decade. Its deep embrace of advertising had resulted in a kind of self-imposed (and sometimes sponsor-imposed) censorship: anything too downbeat, dark, or challenging was being systematically suppressed, for fear of contradicting the upbeat and optimistic commercial messages of television’s sponsors.36 And so while radio, at its best, had forced Americans to confront the horrors of Europe, television was acting as a buffer. “Television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER, for surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive.” Alluding to the Cold War, Murrow added that “there is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.”37

  Without much to do at CBS, Ed Murrow left his lifelong employer and went to work for the John F. Kennedy administration in the early 1960s. But he contracted lung cancer, which weakened him and then spread to his brain. William Paley went to visit Murrow many times as he died. But there was, ultimately, no final reconciliation, at least according to Murrow’s friends. He simply could not stand what Paley had done with television.

  * * *

  *1 The latter was particularly ironic insofar as its only basis was that he’d personally bankrupted and destroyed television’s actual inventors; see The Master Switch, chapter 10.

  *2 The Court’s progress was admittedly uneven. It had strengthened First Amendment protections in the 1940s in cases like Taylor v. Mississippi (1943); yet it remained weak enough that the Court would in 1951 uphold the arrest and conviction of C
ommunist Party leaders in Dennis v. United States based on the premise that they intended to overthrow the government. By the middle of the decade the position had softened, and convictions of communists were being overturned, as in Yates v. United States (1957). Dennis was overruled in 1969.

  *3 The concept of the “unique selling proposition” followed three requirements: first, the advertisement must propose that the product offer a specific benefit; second, the proposition must be unique and one that competition cannot, or does not, offer; third, the proposal must influence the mass to use or switch over to your product. For more, see Rosser Reeves, Reality in Advertising (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).

  *4 The earliest Marlboro campaigns went beyond cowboys to include sailors, construction workers, and others, each of whom for some reason had a tattoo on the back of their hands where a stigmata would be, a fact made much of by cultural theorists.

  *5 Technically, others had proposed the magazine format as early as 1933, but Weaver brought it to broadcast television, at first in new shows like Today and The Tonight Show.

  *6 So much so that the format would be revived in the late 1990s on British and American television as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

  CHAPTER 11

  PRELUDE TO AN ATTENTIONAL REVOLT

  From the 1920s through the 1960s, Zenith Radio Company was one of the world’s leading technology firms and, like Apple in its early days, something of a maverick. Zenith’s innovations were at times brilliantly forward looking: in the 1920s they made the first portable radio, and one of the first car radios using power generated by the vehicle. At other times, however, their projects bordered on the bizarre. In the mid-1930s, for instance, Zenith seriously tested whether it could transmit thoughts to its listeners via radio waves.1 “On these programs,” it said of its telepathy experiments, “the listeners will be taken where no living person has ever been.”

  Zenith was led by Commander E. F. McDonald, who was the sort of eccentric who sometimes ends up in charge of technology firms. While running Zenith, he embarked on a series of explorations, partly to satisfy his taste for adventure but also as publicity stunts, to bring attention to Zenith. As Time would tell:

  Back in the ’20s, he mushed off on North Pole expeditions (he is called “Ange-kok,” Miracle Worker, by the Eskimos); searched for pirates’ gold on a Pacific island; sleuthed for old bones around Lake Superior; flew his own glider; raced his bouncing outboard down the Hudson; mined gold in Mexico. In his spare time, aboard his 185-ft. yacht, Mizpah, he held parties that rattled Chicago tongues.2

  He was, then, a natural individualist and would remain so, even through the apogee of American conformism.

  —

  In the late 1950s, the Commander caught a whiff of discontent brewing among television consumers, an annoyance at having to sit through the new commercial breaks that now interrupted nearly every program since NBC had first introduced them in the mid-1950s. So he ordered Zenith’s engineers to devise a way to give people more control over what their televisions were doing—in particular, the power to “tune out annoying commercials.” He wanted, we would say, an ad-blocker.3

  Within a year, McDonald’s engineers had come up with various answers to his challenge. Zenith put the most promising one into development, and soon started advertising its new Flash-Matic, mainly in print: “Just think! Without budging from your easy chair you can turn your new Zenith Flash-Matic set on, off, or change channels. You can even shut off annoying commercials while the picture remains on the screen.” The Flash-Matic shot visible light at four photo cells, one in each corner of the screen. It was shaped like a revolver, perhaps inspired by the popularity of the western. The idea, according to the inventor, Eugene Polley, was to let the viewer “shoot-out” the ads. Caetlin Benson-Allott writes, “This gunman would be an active, discerning viewer, not just another slack-jawed subject of mass-media propaganda.”4

  Zenith’s invention, what we now call a remote control, might not at first seem like one of history’s most consequential; it didn’t even really block ads, as the Commander had intended, but merely offered a way to mute the set’s volume. But great tech oaks have always grown from little acorns. As Polley would remark in 2002, “The flush toilet may have been the most civilized invention ever devised, but the remote control is the next most important.”5

  The real significance of the remote control was in arming a new popular resistance against the industrialized harvest of attention, what McDonald sensed was a rising demand for a way to defend oneself against what had become such easy access to the mind. It was a desire to take back control over one’s attention, which had been not so wittingly surrendered to a temptation very difficult to quit. For while America still watched television faithfully, as Nielsen proved every week, the hushed reverence of the early years was already giving way to a much more ambivalent relationship. Cultural critics regularly opined on the lost promise of television, and Orson Welles may have spoken for many when he said in 1956: “I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.”6

  What had American viewers implicitly agreed to? Consent is not always a simple matter, legally or philosophically. And willpower always figures into the complications. Jacques Ellul wrote of the individual: “If he is a propagandee, it is because he wants to be, for he is ready to buy a paper, go to the movies, pay for a radio or TV set. Of course, he does not buy these in order to be propagandized—his motivations are more complex. But in doing these things he must know that he opens the door to propaganda.”7

  Likewise, no one ever bought a TV merely to keep up with the latest shampoos or tobacco products, much less to be persuaded to buy them. But the terms of the attention merchants’ contract with the public, which once had seemed so easy and appealing—“free” entertainment in exchange for a moment of your consideration—seemed suddenly to have been revised, and not in the viewers’ favor. Pitches were proliferating, and the programs themselves, their narrative logic, seemed more and more contorted to fit the pitches. The sense of being commerce’s dupe was setting in.

  To be sure, the first remote control was a feeble assertion of self-determination, since to use it was merely to toggle among three stations. Unfortunately, the visible-light technology didn’t work very well either. But great movements, like technologies, must start somewhere.

  In the summer of 1957, a book entitled The Hidden Persuaders appeared and quickly topped the bestseller lists. Its author, Vance Packard, was a muckraker in the old tradition, who felt that it was time to blow the whistle on the advertising game. As he wrote in the introduction, his aim was:

  to explore a strange and rather exotic new area of American life…the large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, “hidden.” The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives.8

  Packard’s accusations did not have the visceral effect that exposing the exaggerations and outright lies of patent medicine advertising had had earlier in the twentieth century. To accept his claims of designs on our unconscious desires and use of hidden or subliminal messages to turn citizens into slavish consumers required a measure of sophistication, not to mention an awareness of the unconscious. But The New Yorker hailed The Hidden Persuaders as a “frightening report on how manufacturers, fund-raisers, and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give, or vote at their command.”9

  Packard’s most compelling chapters revealed advertising’s reliance on shadowy figures like the Freudian Ernest Dichter, whom he cast in a very sinister light, which was not hard to do.* Dichter was found running his “Institute for Motivational Rese
arch” from a castle overlooking the Hudson River, reachable only by a winding dirt road. Within that castle, odd experiments were performed on children from the neighboring village, who watched television or played with toys as researchers observed them through one-way glass. Indeed, the entire village, according to Packard, was combed for subjects, who were extensively analyzed and used as archetypes.

  Perhaps what made Packard’s book so successful was showing commercials to be not merely annoying but extremely effective, and to a degree that most readers would not have suspected. Without necessarily proving the validity of psychological techniques like Dichter’s, it stirred a conspiracy consciousness in the public by revealing that, in the advertisers’ minds, there was more to their efforts than met the eye. That the industry had been surreptitiously engaged in mind games was perhaps easier to swallow than the simpler truth that even the most straightforward ads—like anything we attend to, in fact—can and do influence our behavior. Viewers of television had conditioned themselves to believe that their choices were still their own, whatever commercials might be telling them to do. Having been given cause to think otherwise must have induced a shock of recognition. For as Ellul wrote of propaganda, those most susceptible to it are often those most confident in their skills of detecting it and therefore think themselves immune to its effects.10

  Ultimately, in Packard’s view, the only real defense was to cultivate mental privacy through the avoidance of advertising. “It is this right to privacy in our minds—privacy to be either rational or irrational,” wrote Packard, “that I believe we must strive to protect.”11