The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  Within just two years, commercial television—still by far the heavyweight champion of attention capture—had seen its own revolution of sorts. CBS canceled nearly every show about the rural/urban divide and characters that were “fish out of water.” As Life magazine wrote in 1971, “Slain were every single one of the hillbillies and their imitative relatives.” Also on the block: the once dominant Ed Sullivan Show. Now came a whole new kind of program, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (about an unmarried urban career woman), All in the Family (centered on the experiences of a working-class bigot living in Queens, New York), and M*A*S*H (an antiwar comedy about a field hospital during the Korean War, with regular appearances by blood and death). It was the era of “relevancy,” and a CBS press release touted its new shows as appealing to the “now generation.”

  Silverman’s bet was astute and his touch as programmer every bit as fine as Paley’s—Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, and M*A*S*H were all big hits, eventually to become icons of television history. By 1974, the network had retaken nine of the top-ten-rated programs, and television itself had successfully made itself “relevant,” saving it from a slow sapping of its energies, as its first and most faithful viewership began to age and die. At the same time, Silverman’s success also perhaps showed the challenge and limits of reforming the medium according to Murrow’s vision; for ultimately the business model remained the resale of human attention, and that reality was encoded in the very nature of all the programs. As Paley had first discovered, sometimes you could make the sale with panache; but if not, it still had to be done. Jerry Mander writes, the reformers believed “that television could communicate their message as well as any other….Intent on changing other people’s minds, they did not consider that television might change those who used it.”22

  Even a show as beloved and hilariously subversive as M*A*S*H can be understood to exemplify what Marcuse described as the kind of opposition that actually perpetuates the status quo.* Alan Alda starred as Hawkeye Pierce, an irreverent but deeply humane surgeon sick of the military and uptight people in general. Here was a man of the 1950s that any partisan of the counterculture could love. It was an example of a show, as Jerry Madel put it, that let the writers feel “they were still reaching ‘the people’ with an occasional revolutionary message, fitted ingeniously into the dialogue.” At the same time, M*A*S*H kept tens of millions of Americans, would-be counterculturals among them, faithfully tuned to commercial television during prime time. If the contest really was, as Leary and others proposed, for the minds of the people, it was lost when America renewed its contract with the attention merchants. The broadcasters had adjusted the terms: now it was free, relevant entertainment in exchange for attention. But in the end, everyone would remain easily accessible to advertisers.23

  As for the advertisers themselves, Pepsi had shown that they could make the adjustment to the new sensibility even more nimbly than the broadcasters. A gang of hip new “revolutionary” agencies with young staff surged to success with innovative ways of doing things that mimicked the new younger thinking. These agencies—“the creatives”—mounted a serious challenge to the approaches, and the billings, of advertising firms established over the 1910s through 1920s and still dominant through the 1950s.

  The best and clearest exemplar was New York’s Wells, Rich, Greene, founded in 1966 by thirty-eight-year-old Mary Wells, its president and guiding force. Everything about the agency was timely, including Wells’s announcement at its founding that “we are terribly aware of the current sounds and fears and smells and attitudes. We are the agency of today.” Even the offices spoke rebellion: as one visitor wrote: “There is a psychedelic ‘LOVE’ poster in the foyer. The guest chairs are rattan or bamboo and they have baby blue pillows….The receptionist is from Haiti with just the right amount of accent and chocolate thigh. It follows that the girls beyond the white foyer wall are mini-minded, but a couple are wearing pants.”

  For its slogan, Mary Wells chose one perhaps equally suited to a yoga studio: “love power.” The idea, apparently, was to reach consumers with friendliness, and make them love the product; it was a 180-degree turn from Claude Hopkins’s idea of scaring people into buying things. The approach eventually found its way into Wells’s famous “INY” campaign, with the iconic Milton Glaser design.24

  The new breed of advertisers made it explicit that they were not like the advertisers of old. As a cosmetics ad written by Wells Rich reads, “We’re not going to sell you a lot of goo you don’t need.” Instead, the ad reassured its readers, they were with the buyers, and shared their desires:

  We’re young too.

  And we’re on your side.

  We know it’s a tough race.

  And we want you to win.

  The firm infused the same rebellious themes into nearly all of its work. Wells herself instructed the staff to come up with ideas this way: “Consider what you can’t do, then do it.” Indeed, doing it the unconventional way became reflexive. When, for instance, Philip Morris gave them the account for Benson & Hedges—an old British brand whose main distinction was its length (100 mm)—Wells came up with a strange set of advertisements that focused on the disadvantages of a longer cigarette—being caught in doors, under car hoods, and so on, with the tagline “Benson & Hedges 100’s must taste pretty good; look what people put up with to smoke them.”

  Much of this approach depended on hiring a new generation of creatives. By the late 1960s, agencies were a parade of long hair and miniskirts. Draper Daniels, who had worked on the Marlboro Man at Leo Burnett in 1950s, noted wryly, “Obviously, pink shirts are more creative than white shirts. Paisley shirts are more creative than pink shirts. A blue denim shirt, or no shirt at all, is the ultimate in creativity. Beads or a locket are a sure sign of something close to genius.”25

  The new hires were asked to put their revolutionary ideology acquired in college or graduate school into causes like Pond’s cold cream. “The suffragettes who whip into the store for today’s Pond’s creams,” read the new copy, are “a whole new genre of unfettered, free-spirited, savvy women who know how to cut through the phony baloney of the beauty business and get right down to basics.” After a while, the trick became obvious enough for even the stodgiest of the 1950s advertisers and companies to get in on the act. Anyone, apparently, could be a hippie, or at least work with that desire for individuality and freedom to book billings.26

  Perhaps no effort better typified the dexterity of advertising’s old guard than the campaign for Virginia Slims. Introduced in 1967 by Philip Morris as a Benson & Hedges spinoff for women, Slims were just as long but even thinner. Leo Burnett’s creative department dusted off the old 1920s saw of smoking as women’s liberation to produce a version styled for second-wave feminism. Now the “torches of freedom” were being carried by women in floral print minidresses. The jingle ironically casts this return to one of modern advertising’s lowest points as the ultimate step in the steady march of progress:

  You’ve come a long way, baby

  To get where you’ve got to today

  You’ve got your own cigarette now, baby

  You’ve come a long, long way

  What was the secret to how the attention industries cheated death yet again, even when the whole zeitgeist of the late 1960s and ’70s was seemingly against them? The success may finally be put down to the saving logic of capitalism. For what makes capitalism so powerful is its resilience and adaptability. The game is never lost, only awaiting the next spin of the wheel. As a mode of production, capitalism is a perfect chameleon; it has no disabling convictions but profit and so can cater to any desire, even those inimical to it. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank theorizes that “in the sixties…hip became central to the way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public.” And so even “disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”27

&nbs
p; It would, however, be unfair to claim in a broad sense that the commercial attention industries “won” the 1960s from their noncommercial antagonists, whether public broadcasters, spiritual seekers, those espousing liberation à la Marcuse, or merely those yearning for a simpler life. For clearly those ideas would leave their lasting mark. Individualism became the dominant American ethos, even of capitalism itself. But in a narrower sense, commerce did win: the counterculture’s call for the revitalization of spirituality and social consciousness inspired very few to make a permanent break even from television, the great portal to all that was wrong with society. To the contrary, by the early 1970s, television viewing had increased to an average of six hours per day per household. Perhaps Jerry Mander was right to say that the well-meaning had simply fought the wrong fight, seeking to reform television instead of realizing that it was the problem. What kind of force could take a moment of such disenchantment with its existence and turn it into a moment so ripe with opportunity?28 Who could turn the world on with its guile?

  Many were the hopes that would be chewed up and spit out again, Timothy Leary’s among them. By the early 1970s, his dream of a religious awakening under the influence of psychedelics lay in ruins when he was imprisoned on drug charges following the criminalization of LSD. And so by that point, the main public exponents of his ideas—albeit in modified form—were companies like Pepsi, Pond’s, and the makers of the grapefruit beverage Squirt, whose slogan was “Turn on to flavor, tune in to sparkle, and drop out of the cola rut.”

  Ever ready to identify itself with anything unquestionably American, even Coca-Cola, the brand once synonymous with 1950s conformity, would eventually arrive at the same place as everyone else. In 1971, they got another pillar of the establishment, the New York agency McCann Erickson (slogan: “Truth well told”), to express Coke’s own version of liberation and love in what would be the brand’s most enduring campaign. McCann identified the sweetest and most generous aspirations of the era with the buying of Coca-Cola. The result: a canticle to consumption, to fellowship as commerce—and the best damn commercial of the 1970s:

  I’d like to buy the world a home

  And furnish it with love

  Grow apple trees and honey bees

  And snow white turtle doves

  I’d like to teach the world to sing

  In perfect harmony

  I’d like to buy the world a Coke

  And keep it company

  That’s the real thing29

  * * *

  * Marcuse had a particularly arcane term for this dynamic by which a putative form of liberation nonetheless manages to perpetuate existing power structures and prop up “the system.” He called it “repressive desublimation.”

  CHAPTER 13

  CODA TO AN ATTENTIONAL REVOLUTION

  Coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, Jonathan Robbin was fascinated by two things: social movements and the power of computers. He belonged to a particular breed of idealist, one that might include Frederick Taylor, George Nielsen, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom came to believe deeply that the world’s problems could be solved by better data and management. What Wallace Stegner wrote of his character Rodman, a radical-turned-sociologist, he might have written of Jonathan Robbin: he was “interested in change, all right, but only as a process; and he is interested in values, but only as data.”1 Robbin himself put it this way: “I am interested in the problems of measurement and interpretation…understanding how things work and using that information and knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”2 In fact, over his career he would join the not-so-rare species of academic who begins by trying to save the world and ends up trying to cash in.

  “Equally at home quoting Baudelaire and R. Crumb,” as one observer remarked, Robbin would become a professor at New York University in the 1950s.3 He would spend the following decade building first-generation computer models to predict things like where urban riots were likely to occur, the same way you might predict the weather.4 Robbin’s models were based on observations of the Chicago School of Sociology, which aimed to understand American communities like ecosystems. Neighborhoods, the sociologists thought, could be seen as super-organisms with lives of their own apart from those of the individuals living in them; they would mature and grow or shrink and disappear over time, like a rainforest.5

  The aim of better understanding communities dovetailed with “the politics of recognition,” a major strain of 1960s and 1970s countercultural thought. Like much else it developed in opposition to the “cookie-cutter” mentality of the 1950s. The rough thesis was that the diversity of the American public needed to be understood and recognized, particularly in the case of groups long left out of the dominant discourse. Along with related liberation movements, the 1970s saw a surge in popular interest in marginalized groups, like women, or subcultures, like African Americans, Latinos, gays, Native Americans, and so on. It all fit the spirit of individualism.6

  Robbin’s models brought computational rigor to the Chicago School’s methods, which were empirical and qualitative. At the height of a progressive movement to acknowledge and empower neglected groups—African Americans most prominently—Robbin worked on what he called “cluster analysis,” by which one could understand more precisely what kind of people lived in any neighborhood based on the “principle that residents living near each other are likely to have similar demographic, socio-economic and lifestyle characteristics.”7 His public-spirited but academic goal to gain a better understanding of what the nation really looked like.

  In the early 1970s, however, perhaps succumbing to boredom, or academic disillusionment, Robbin decided there might be a way to commercialize his work. So he founded Claritas (Latin for “clarity”). A one-man start-up, Claritas was arguably the first firm to exploit the new social science that Robbin and other practitioners called “geodemography.” The basic notion was that approaches developed to predict urban crime could also help advertisers improve the marketing of their products.

  Robbin had noticed that the politics of recognition had a natural commercial counterpart that might be termed the business of recognition. For decades, most of the twentieth century really, advertisers had aimed their appeals to a great commonality, as imagined, or some might say invented, by advertising itself. The only recognition of distinct identities and desires took the form of trying to understand women buyers (as the Women’s Department of J. Walter Thompson was charged to do) or young consumers (as everyone tried to do) and eccentric one-off efforts, like Pepsi’s run at black America. But there were never rubrics any more granular than “blacks,” “youth,” or “Southerners.” Members of these groups did have some things in common, yet much was missing.

  Working with public census data, and the relatively new Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) codes created by the Post Office, Robbin would produce his great masterpiece by 1978. He called it the “Potential Ratings in ZIP Markets” system, or PRIZM. PRIZM sorted the entire U.S. population into forty subnations, or “clusters,” each with a set of exact geographical locations. With PRIZM, a new reality revealed itself to Robbin: there was no United States, but forty distinctive nations all calling the same continent home.

  The notion of distinct social subsets within the borders of one country may seem obvious today. But at the time it gave the lie to an essential premise of marketing and advertising: that Americans were a single people whose demands could easily be served by one set of consumer products. Even those single-variable parameters that had earlier served the limited efforts at more specific targeting were obsolete. “Forget sex. Forget race, national origin, age, household composition, and wealth,” wrote business author Michael Weiss, describing PRIZM. “The characteristic that defines and separates Americans more than any other is the cluster.”8

  What defined these forty nations? Based on the census data, Robbin identified thirty-four factors that he determined accounted for 87 percent of the variation across the United States. These did include race, income, and the l
ike, but not acting alone. Rather, such markers tended to aggregate and follow the same pattern in similar places. Robbin programmed his computers to profile tens of thousands of new zip codes, sorting the results into these clusters of like-minded areas, each of which he assigned an evocative name, like the “Bohemian Mix,” “Shotguns & Pickups,” or “Young Suburbia.”

  As an early guide to the clusters prepared in the 1980s explains, those who lived in “Young Influential” neighborhoods were the “young, upwardly mobile singles and dual career couples”; mostly they were to be “found in the inner-ring suburb of major cities.” As to priorities: they “don’t care about good schools, because they don’t have children.” Rather, “they want a mall with a sushi bar, gourmet cookie shop, travel agency and a psychotherapy center.”9 They read books at twice the rate of the national average, and they tended to vote Republican. By contrast, Claritas found that those living in the “Bohemian Mix” areas, like New York’s Greenwich Village, were “an eclectic melange of never-married and divorced singles, young Turks and older professionals, blacks and whites” who held “benefit dances for the Sandinistas.” “Squash, racquetball and jogging” were among their typical pastimes.10

  The initial definition of the forty clusters obviously involved considerable subjectivity on Robbin’s part, but from the beginning he expected the clusters to evolve and grow more precise. In his vision of America, traditional demarcations, like state lines, didn’t have much meaning; to drive across the nation was to visit not places like Kansas or Iowa, but rather local chapters of clusters like “Shotguns & Pickups,” “Gold Coasts,” and so on. While some (like “Sharecroppers” or “Industrial”) were found in only certain regions, in general the same neighborhoods, as he saw it, repeated across the land, with any local variations being merely cosmetic.