The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  “We made a decision,” he later recalled, “to stop talking about the product, and start talking about the user.”10 He thus conceived of marketing Pepsi without reference to its inherent qualities, focusing instead on an image of the people who bought it, or who should be buying it. They were the people of the moment: the young, the rebellious, those who (to borrow a later slogan) “think different.” They would be known, in Pottasch’s new formula, as “the Pepsi Generation.”

  The new ads were the picture of vitality: beautiful young people casually dressed, hanging out, and having fun. “Come alive!” the text read, “You’re in the Pepsi generation!” Others read, “For a generation really on the move.” Printed in 1964, they look nothing like the more staid advertisements of just a year earlier. Following up on popularity it had won among African Americans, Pepsi also ran similar ads with African American models, also building what would become the brand’s countercultural bona fides.

  “For us to name and claim a whole generation after our product was a rather courageous thing,” Pottasch would later remember, “that we weren’t sure would take off.”11 But his intuition would prove correct. “What you drank said something about who you were. We painted an image of our consumer as active, vital, and young at heart.”12

  Pepsi, of course, did not create the desire for liberation in various matters from music to sex to manners and dress. Rather, it had cleverly identified with a fashionable individualism. All individualisms, of course, harbor a strain of narcissism, and Pepsi had implicitly understood that, too. For ultimately what the Pepsi Generation were consuming wasn’t so much cola as an image of themselves.

  Whether Pepsi’s approach was truly original is a good question; advertisers are continually claiming to invent things that, on closer inspection, have long existed. But clearly, this campaign had nothing to do with the traditional hard sell, with the product, and what it might do for you, front and center. Pepsi’s advertisements and their imitators were in some sense just an even softer version of the soft sell, which pictured an ideal and associated it with the product. Into this category one might put both the “Arrow Man,” a dashing figure who wore Arrow shirts in the 1920s, and the Marlboro Man, solitary smoker of the Great Plains. But no one who smoked Marlboros wanted or expected to become a wrangler. The Pepsi difference was to suggest that consuming the product somehow made you into what you wanted to be.

  In any case, by the end of the decade the Pepsi Generation campaign would start steadily closing the gap with Coke, reaching comparable market share, even if Coca-Cola remained ahead. Meanwhile, Pepsi kept riding the wave it had caught, engineering an ever fuller embrace of the counterculture, even its psychedelic aspects. The company aired a bizarre television spot in which a young woman wearing a sequined dress dances through a night in New York punctuated by abrupt flashes of lights and sound, resembling an LSD trip, with an occasional Pepsi logo thrown in. But Pepsi had greater success with the “Live–Give” campaign, playing on more appealing countercultural values, like a return to natural, simple pleasures and living in peace. Here was consumption coaxed with an anti-consumerist ethos; it was Pepsi selling the counterculture to mainstream America, as Leary and others had only aspired to do.

  Consider a typical spot from 1969 that opens with a toddler atop a horse, followed by a long-haired man drinking water (not Pepsi) from a stream using his bare hands. “There’s a whole new way of living,” sings a voice, “Pepsi helps supply the drive.” Then a rapid succession of images: children frolicking in nature, a young couple walking on the beach, a child milking a cow—ordinary people doing regular, yet fulfilling things. A voice-over goes:

  “Recognize it? This is the world you live in. Packed with simple pleasures. Places to see. People to love. And Pepsi-Cola is the one cola that belongs with every happy, hopeful moment you love.”

  The chorus chimes in with the new slogan: “You’ve got a lot to live…and Pepsi’s got a lot to give…”

  It’s a truly remarkable compilation of hippie-era images and values. There are no status symbols, workplaces, or wealth; instead, all that is indulged in are natural, easy pleasures, mainly outdoors. The people are attractive but not unattainably so, and the various races and ages mingle in harmony.

  What Pepsi pictured (or co-opted) was essentially Marcuse’s imagined earthly paradise—unrepressed joy, activity, and love, a life altogether free of anxiety or oppression. There are no technologies, only Frisbees and flowers; love, both familial and romantic, is experienced without hindrance or implied hierarchies. In essence, Pepsi advertised liberation.

  The commercials were famous for their music, which sounded like a mixture of the Beatles and Sesame Street. Here is how the company described them:

  Exciting new groups doing out-of-sight new things to and for music. It’s youth’s bag and Pepsi-Cola is in it. There’s a whole new way of livin’ and Pepsi’s supplyin’ the background music…It’s a radio package that obliterates the generation gap and communicates like a guru.13

  It is interesting to consider what vision the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s might have achieved if it could have reversed the commercialization of human attention. Its leaders aspired to an age when commercial television and its advertising would face mass indifference and wilt into irrelevance. Once people had tuned out the “establishment” sources of information, advertising would be recognized as a form of propaganda and carefully avoided. Starved of requisite attention, it would collapse as it nearly did in the 1930s. In its place, the public mind would attend to realities that weren’t commercial contrivances—nature, spiritual paths, friends, family, and lovers. Media, if any were needed, would be things like live concerts or perhaps programming in the public interest. A cynic might say the 1960s vision of the alternative future was just sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, with, perhaps, some public radio thrown in.

  There’s little question that the revolt of the 1960s did lead part of a generation away from the attention merchants of the 1950s. But industry calibrated an effective response and perhaps ultimately read the public mood more accurately than any guru. For they had detected the essence of the spirit of liberation: for most people it was not an end of desire (as in some Buddhist sense), or a wish for solitary withdrawal (in a monastic sense), or even, as Leary had hoped, a spiritual longing equal to motivating an inward turn. Rather, after decades of relative conformity and one of ultimate conformity, what had been uncorked was powerful individual desires and the will to express them. Above all, most simply wanted to feel more like an individual. And that was a desire industry could cater to, just like any other.

  The most confident among the advertisers knew that the 1960s would not extinguish consumerism, for a simple reason: desire’s most natural endpoint is consumption, and advertisers, after honing their art for half a century, knew how to convert all manner of desire into demand for products. And young people’s desires were no exception. In fact, as one advertising executive, John Adams, put it in 1971, “They [the hippies] are in the peak acquisitive years, and their relative affluence enables them to consume goods and services at a rate unheard of for their age level.”14

  Marcuse, who was the kind of idealist given to unrelenting pessimism, predicted in 1964 that the promise of liberation would be used for further repression. “Liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination,”15 he argued, for “free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves” and “free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear.”16 This is where an intellectual loses his guruship: leading his followers toward a conceptual bridge too far. If the people wanted liberation, and if Pepsi was selling it, most people seemed to think, why not just buy it from them?

  Of course, to succeed at selling a new snake oil, albeit one with a spiritual flavor, advertisers would still need one thing—access to the public mind. That they would have it points
to the main reason why the hoped-for attentional revolution of the 1960s and 1970s ultimately failed. It was nothing to do with the message, which was, in fact, powerfully delivered and readily embraced. Rather, the failure was owing to one often unremarked fact: over the 1960s and 1970s, most people simply did not stop watching television.

  The public was, the activist-adman Jerry Mander wrote, “as they had been for years, sitting home in their living rooms, staring at blue light, their minds filled with TV images. One movement became the same as the next one; one media action merged with the fictional program that followed; one revolutionary line was erased by the next commercial, leading to a new level of withdrawal, unconcern, and stasis. In the end, the sixties were revealed as the flash of light before the bulb goes out.”

  Consider that, over the 1960s, the countercultural Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors would all reach their largest audiences by appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show. Ultimately, the habit of prime time proved more powerful than the forces arrayed against it. With their access to the public mind mostly intact, the industries of attention had the opportunity not just to survive but to prosper.17

  While there had always been those who viewed broadcast television as irredeemable, more moderate elements believed that the medium was essentially neutral; if it had become nothing but an attention harvester, it might yet be reimagined and reprogrammed to serve somewhat loftier goals. Essentially they believed in the potential ascribed to TV early on by those like Murrow, who had said, “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.”

  Accordingly, by the early 1960s, noncommercial television stations were broadcasting in major cities: WNET in New York, KQED in San Francisco, WGBH in Boston, to name a few. It was Murrow himself who opened WNET in 1962, proclaiming the beginning of a “great adventure.” And it was with juvenile audiences that the noncommercial alternatives found their first successes, most notably Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street.

  “I got into television,” Fred Rogers once told CNN, “because I hated it so.” A soft-spoken aspiring minister who favored cardigans, Rogers had the idea, radical in its time, that children’s television ought to be good for children. He had worked at NBC in the early 1950s, and then moved to Pittsburgh to work on a local public show named The Children’s Corner, which briefly ran on the network.

  Children, of course, have less control over their attention than adults, but when they do pay attention, they open their minds more fully to the messages presented. By the early 1950s advertisers had come to understand the commercial potential of reaching children by television. The Howdy Doody Show, featuring a clown and a dancing puppet, for instance, was sponsored by Kellogg’s, and during every show Howdy Doody would dance around a cereal box. But those were the early days. By the late 1950s, programmers had learned to create shows that in a sense served as advertisements themselves, like The Mickey Mouse Club, which helped nurture enduring attachments to characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and other friends. That, in turn, helped drive sales of toys, tickets to Disney’s feature films, trips to Disneyland, and so on. And by the late 1950s, toy makers began creating toys specifically designed to be advertised on television: like Mattel’s first girl-directed toy, the Barbie doll, whose commercials, which ran during breaks in The Mickey Mouse Club, chronicled glamorous episodes in Barbie’s life.

  Fred Rogers had fundamentally different ideas as to what the goals of children’s television should be. But he could find no lasting place for his ideas in 1950s American commercial television. Instead he got his break in Canada, where the State-run Canadian Broadcasting Company invited him to present Misterogers for northern children. On his new show, Rogers invited children into an imaginary world populated mainly by puppets, who spoke to children as friends. When in 1964 Rogers returned to the United States, he relaunched the show in Pittsburgh as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And so began his new routine: changing his shoes as he came in the door, symbolizing the passage into a different world. Rogers’s approach to his audience was highly innovative. He addressed ordinary, even mundane challenges, but ones likely to face his young viewers, like a fear of haircuts or monsters, or a quarrel between siblings.

  Sesame Street, public television’s second great success, was a self-conscious effort to “master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them.” The show’s creators appealed to children by mimicking commercial television’s tricks for gaining attention, with techniques like breaking news (narrated by Kermit the Frog), sponsors (“Today is sponsored by the letter E”), and “commercial breaks” featuring favorites like Ernie and Bert. Author Malcolm Gladwell summed it up this way: “Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them.”18

  Public broadcasting was not quite radical, but its growing strength came at a time when America’s networks had indeed begun a close flirtation with losing relevance—meaning, young audiences. Most of NBC’s, ABC’s, and CBS’s leading shows were still keyed to the tastes of the 1950s. If we examine CBS, in particular, we see that top shows of the 1960s were “rural” shows like The Beverly Hillbillies (about a backwoods family living in Beverly Hills), Green Acres (urban socialites take up “farm living”), and Hee Haw (a country music variety show). Innocuous, comforting entertainment, to be sure, and still capable of bringing tens of millions to prime time, each and every night, but hardly in sync with countercultural viewers. As ratings began dropping, the whole enterprise began to sag. Commercial television was surviving the late 1960s on sheer inertia—the lasting power of attentional habits is never to be underestimated—and the fact that the backlash, such as it was, was mainly in the younger demographics, and had not reached the whole population.

  Buoyed by their success with children, over the late 1960s public broadcasters began to reach directly for countercultural audiences with shows like the Public Broadcasting Laboratory, a magazine program produced by Fred Friendly. It debuted with a drama featuring blacks in “white-face,” and among PBL’s productions was Inside North Vietnam, a fairly sympathetic portrayal of the country under American air attack. Another ambitious effort was The Great American Dream Machine, an antiestablishment, anti-consumerist variety show, if such a thing could exist. “We’re trying to show what a great country this could be,” said the producers, “if we got rid of the false values sold to us by hucksters and con men who have contempt for the public.”19

  Meanwhile, in an effort to consolidate and extend the success of college radio, National Public Radio was launched at just about the same time, its first program director a college radio veteran, Bill Siemering. “I was an ordinary-looking Midwestern kind of guy,” he said once. “No one ever remembered who I was. So I grew a beard.” The debut of NPR’s new flagship, All Things Considered, ran an hour and twenty-eight minutes, beginning with live coverage of Vietnam protests before turning to a lighter segment on small-town barber shops in “this age of unshorn locks, with shagginess transformed into a lifestyle.” Over time, NPR would gain audiences even larger than public television’s, proving the older broadcast platform yet had real life in it.20

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  Things might have turned out different for television as a whole, and CBS in particular, had the network not appointed a twenty-five-year-old named Fred Silverman as director of daytime programming in 1963. Silverman would later be acclaimed as “the man with the golden gut.” Though hardly a hippie, Silverman had a good ear for what would speak to his generation and countercultural critics. Perhaps, too, he was just young enough to teach himself the Pepsi trick for selling to them.

  Silverman’s first successes were in children’s programming, and his first coup was the unexpected success of A Charlie Brown Christmas, in 1965. Commissioned independently, the special was nothing like the typically gauzy 1950s holiday programming, f
or it was written as a sharp rebuke of the commercialization of Christmas. Rejecting the flashy aluminum Christmas trees then in fashion, Charlie Brown buys a pathetic actual pine sapling that seems to die when the first ornament is attached. The perennial loser and “blockhead” has blown it again. But, then, the other children realize that the sad little spruce captures the true spirit of Christmas. They decorate it into a glorious tree, which their song brings to life. A Charlie Brown Christmas proved once again the counterintuitive truth that anti-commercialism could yield great commercial success; and so it did, earning high ratings for CBS and excellent exposure for its sponsor, Coca-Cola.21 Among other things, Silverman, who also launched Scooby-Doo, cited Sesame Street as an influence and proof that a show “can be entertaining and informative at the same time.” By the late 1960s, CBS had already canceled its last prime-time game shows and launched 60 Minutes, an obvious bid to resurrect See It Now. Now the show would prove that bracing investigative journalism could, in fact, garner top ratings.

  By the late 1960s, some at CBS began to see that incremental adjustments aimed at children would not solve the problem facing television. If the business was to grow again, it had to do things aimed beyond the fan base of The Lawrence Welk Show. And so in 1970, Fred Silverman, just thirty-two, was made head of all programming, supported by Robert Wood, the new network president, who was forty-five. The new CBS would challenge many axioms of the attention merchant. Perhaps most importantly, it sought not just the largest audiences, but the “right” audiences. CBS was already the largest network, but the men took seriously what McLuhan called the “dinosaur effect”—the premise that they might be at their largest size right before extinction. The two immediately set about a thorough purge, redirecting the network toward the young, liberated, and socially conscious. Among others, chairman William Paley, now in his seventies, but still active in programming decisions, approved. As he said “You finally have…a vision of what is absolutely correct.”