The Attention Merchants
Page 43
21. George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920).
CHAPTER 8: THE PRINCE
1. Sources for the life and times of William Paley include Sally Bedell Smith, In All His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Jim Cox, American Radio Networks: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); Jim Cox, Goodnight Gracie: The Last Years of Network Radio (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002). Other sources on radio broadcast industry and the rise of CBS include Michael J. Socolow, “Always in Friendly Competition: NBC and CBS in the First Decade of National Broadcasting,” in NBC: America’s Network, ed. Michele Hilmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Erik Barnouw, The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, Volume 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Cynthia B. Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Michele Hilmes, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (New York: Routledge, 2012); David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf, 1979).
2. The Radio Act of 1927 codified the understanding that broadcasters were to serve “the public interest” and also established the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), which would regulate radio according to “the public interest, convenience, or necessity.”
3. For a fuller discussion of Sarnoff’s enormously consequential career, see Tim Wu, The Master Switch (New York: Vintage, 2011); Kenneth Bilby, The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).
4. Bernays urged Paley to include “superior educational, cultural, and news programs” in CBS’s lineup and “publicize them aggressively—even deceptively,” although these programs only constituted a small portion of CBS’s total offerings. For more on the theory of the “Tiffany Network,” see Smith, In All His Glory.
5. Halberstam, The Powers That Be, 27.
6. David Halberstam, “The Power and the Profits,” Media 237, no. 1 (1976).
7. David Patrick Columbia, Quest Magazine, 1993.
8. For more on the Elder-Woodruff Audimeter’s development, see Hugh Malcolm Beville Jr., Audience Ratings: Radio, Television, and Cable (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988); Beville, Audience Ratings, 219.
9. Robert Elder letter of February 8, 1978.
10. The Edward R. Murrow Papers, a collection of books, memorabilia, and audiovisual material, can be found at Tufts University, the world’s largest collection of Edward R. Murrow material.
11. From an account of a British bombing raid in Berlin on December 3, 1945. See Bob Edwards, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
CHAPTER 9: TOTAL ATTENTION CONTROL, OR THE MADNESS OF CROWDS
1. David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (London: Routledge, 1993), 42; Thomas Crosby, “Volksgemeinschaft: Nazi Radio and Its Destruction of Hitler’s Utopian Vision,” Valley Humanities Review (Spring 2014); David Nicholls, Adolf Hitler: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2000).
2. Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013); Marcel Cornis-Pope, New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression: Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014), 102.
3. See Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896).
4. Richard F. Bensel, Passion and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic Convention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 231–33.
5. See Margaret Harris and George Butterworth, Developmental Psychology: A Student’s Handbook (New York: Psychology Press, 2002); and Naomi Eilan et al., eds., Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
6. “Putzi Hanfstaengl,” Helytimes, October 18, 2013, http://stevehely.com/2013/10/18/putzi-hanfstaengl/. To read more about Albert Speer’s experience hearing Hitler speak, see Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 474. John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2010), 56. For Alfons Heck’s account of the Nazi rally, see Alfons Heck, A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days when God Wore a Swastika (Phoenix: Renaissance House, 2001), 21–23. Brian E. Fogarty, Fascism: Why Not Here? (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2011), 28–29. For more about Leni Riefenstahl’s experience, see Leni Riefenstahl, Leni Riefenstahl (New York: Macmillan, 1995).
7. Terry Rowan, World War II Goes to the Movies and Television Guide (Lulu.com, 2012); John Malam, Hitler Invades Poland (London: Cherrytree Books, 2008).
8. This translated quote from Triumph of the Will can be found in Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007), 93; Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman, The Third Reich Sourcebook (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013). For the original German, see Feuilletons für Triumph des Willens. For Goebbels’s entire speech, given on August 18, 1933, see Joseph Goebbels, “Der Rundfunk als achte Großmacht,” Signale der neuen Zeit. 25 ausgewählte Reden von Dr. Joseph Goebbels (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1938), http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb56.htm.
9. Nicholas J. Cull et al., Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003); Thomas Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). For more on the development and use of radio in Nazi Germany, see Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Daria Frezza, The Leader and the Crowd: Democracy in American Public Discourse, 1880–1941 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).
10. The statistics relating to radio in Germany were drawn from Martin Collier and Philip Pedley, Hitler and the Nazi State (London: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 2005). Eugen Hadamovsky, “Die lebende Brücke: Vom Wesen der Funkwartarbeit,” in Dein Rundfunk (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1934), http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/hada3.htm. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000).
11. For a discussion about legal paternalism, see A. P. Simester and Andreas von Hirsch, Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs: On the Principles of Criminalisation (Oxford, UK: Hart Publishing, 2011).
12. Joseph S. Tuman, Communicating Terror: The Rhetorical Dimensions of Terrorism (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2010). For more discussion on the influence and psychology of advertising, see Leslie E. Gill, Advertising and Psychology (New York: Routledge, 2013). Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1939), 236–37. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968). Hans Fritzsche, “Dr. Goebbels und sein Ministerium,” in Hans Heinz Mantau-Sadlia, Deutsche Führer Deutsches Schicksal. Das Buch der Künder und Führer des dritten Reiches (Munich: Verlag Max Steinebach, 1934) 330–42, http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb62.htm.
13. Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53: The Information Research Department (New York: Routledge, 2004); Joseph D. Douglass Jr., Soviet Military Strategy in Europe (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981). For a discussion on First Amendment jurisprudence and its effects, see Tamara R. Piety, Brandishing the First Amendment: Commercial Expression in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).
CHAPTER 10: PEAK ATTENTION, AMERICAN STYLE
1. Gary Edgerton, The Columbia History of American Television (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 113.
2. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: Appleton, 1916) 153.
3. See Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, Lo schermo empatico: Cinema e neuroscienze (Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2015).
4. Bianca Bradbury, “Is Television Mama’s Fr
iend or Foe?,” Good Housekeeping, November 1950, 263–64.
5. Calder Willingham, “Television: Giant in the Living Room,” American Mercury, February 1952.
6. Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 103.
7. Reuven Frank, Out of Thin Air: The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 33.
8. Jack Gould, “Radio and Television: Edward R. Murrow’s News Review ‘See It Now’ Demonstrates Journalistic Power of Video,” New York Times, November 19, 1951, 26.
9. For more information on Murrow’s and Friendly’s coverage of McCarthy and the Red Scare, see Ralph Engelman, Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
10. For more on the rise of CBS and the intense competition it faced in the programming industry, see David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf, 1979), 417.
11. Jacques Ellul, “The Characteristics of Propaganda,” in Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion, ed. Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2006). Ellul discusses how individual spectators of mass media, though “diffused and not assembled at one point,” become a mass that may be subject to propaganda.
12. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 26. Mander, a former advertising executive, was critical of the many problems of television that were inherent to the medium itself.
13. The remark likely first made in 1955 and later appeared in Confessions of an Advertising Man, in which Ogilvy wrote a “how-to-succeed” in advertising guide for future generations. See David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 96.
14. For more information on the Anacin campaign, see “Anacin,” Advertising Age, last modified September 15, 2003, http://adage.com/article/adage-encyclopedia/anacin/98501/. For more information on the M&M’s campaign, see “Mars, Inc.,” Advertising Age, last modified September 15, 2003, http://adage.com/article/adage-encyclopedia/mars/98761/.
15. Mark Tungate, Adland: A Global History of Advertising (Philadelphia: KoganPage, 2013), 68.
16. For more information about the Marlboro Man and its development as an American icon, see “The Man of Make-Believe,” The Economist, January 24, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21640293-darrell-winfield-real-marlboro-man-died-january-12th-aged-85-man-make-believe. For more about the Jolly Green Giant, see “The Green Giant,” Advertising Age, last modified March 29, 1999, http://adage.com/article/special-report-the-advertising-century/green-giant/140172/. For more about Tony the Tiger, see E. J. Schultz, “A Tiger at 60: How Kellogg’s Tony Is Changing for a New Age,” Advertising Age, last modified August 29, 2011, http://adage.com/article/news/kellogg-s-tony-tiger-60-changing-a-age/229493/.
17. Tungate, Adland, 65.
18. Edith Witt, “The Personal Adman,” Reporter, May 14, 1959, 36–37.
19. Ronald Fullerton, “Ernest Dichter: The Motivational Researcher,” in Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture, ed. Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 58, 143, 147.
20. Dichter’s theory of “food genders” became especially sought out by advertisers; Dichter claimed that consumers had a subconscious, psychological response to foods, which influenced how they made their purchasing decisions. For this reason, Dichter believed it was important for advertisers to classify various food products along gender lines to gain insight into why consumers prefer one product over another. For more on Dichter’s theory of “food genders,” see Ernest Dichter, “Creative Research Memo on the Psychology of Food,” submitted to the Fitzgerald Advertising Agency (July 1955); Ernest Dichter, “Creative Research Memo on the Sex of Rice,” submitted to Leo Burnett Co. (October 1955); Ernest Dichter, “A Motivational Research Study of Luncheon Meats and Wieners,” submitted to Bonsib, Inc. (November 1968), 16; and Katherine Parkin, “The ‘Sex of Food’: Ernest Dichter, Libido and American Food Advertising,” in Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research, ed. Schwarzkopf and Gries, 140–54.
21. Ernest Dichter, Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The Psychology of the World of Objects (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 419.
22. Ernest Dichter, Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The Psychology of the World of Objects (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 66; Lawrence R. Samuel, Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 97.
23. For more on Dichter and his research, see Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire (New Brunswick, NJ: Doubleday, 1960), 290, 297; Ernest Dichter, Getting Motivated by Ernest Dichter: The Secret Behind Individual Motivations by the Man Who Was Not Afraid to Ask “Why?” (New York: Pergamon, 1979); Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay, 1957); Fullerton, Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research, 47.
24. David Sarnoff hired the “remarkable” Sylvester (“Pat”) Weaver in 1949 as head of new television operations. Weaver has been described as “an articulate visionary, viewed by many who worked with him as a brilliant mind.” Gerard Jones, Honey, I’m Home: Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). For more discussion on NBC’s history and success, see Jim Bell, “Introduction,” in From Yesterday to Today: Six Decades of America’s Favorite Morning Show (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2012), xi.
25. Tino Balio, Hollywood in the Age of Television (New York: Routledge, 2013); James L. Baughman, Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948–1961 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 190.
26. John McDonough and Karen Egolf, The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising (Chicago: Routledge, 2015). CBS during the Paley-Murrow years might be first in prestige and quality, but it was nonetheless number two to NBC in programming, advertising revenues, and profit, and always had been. Bill Paley had never really accepted that status.” David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf, 1979).
27. These details about The $64,000 Question were drawn from “The 64,000 Question,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/quizshow/peopleevents/pande06.html; Kent Anderson, Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1978); Lawrence Grobel, The Hustons: The Life and Times of a Hollywood Dynasty (New York: Scribner, 1989); Su Holmes, The Quiz Show (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Kent Anderson, Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1978), 3.
28. “Herbert Stempel,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/quizshow/peopleevents/pande01.html; Holmes, The Quiz Show, 47; Patricia Mellencamp, ed., Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
29. For more information on quiz shows in the 1950s, see Anderson, Television Fraud; and Holmes, The Quiz Show.
30. In 1976, CBS fell to third in prime-time ratings for the first time in two decades as ABC took the lead. For more information, see Sally Bedell Smith, In All His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley, the Legendary Tycoon and His Brilliant Circle (New York: Random House, 1990); Harold L. Vogel, 9th ed. of Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
31. Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf, 1979).
32. Fred W. Friendly, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control (New York: Random House, 1967).
33. Halberstam, The Powers That Be. Ken Auletta, “The 64,000 Question,” The New Yorker, September 14, 1994.
34. Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 187. Jack Gould, “ ‘See It Now’ Finale: Program Unexpectedl
y Ends Run of Seven Distinguished Years on CBS,” New York Times, July 8, 1958.
35. John Crosby, “The Demise of ‘See It Now,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, July 11, 1958.
36. The fullest description of this point is Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor, Notes on a Modern Potentate (London: Oxford University Press, 1978).
37. Edward R. Murrow, “Wires and Lights in a Box,” in Documents of American Broadcasting, ed. Frank J. Kahn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978). Originally presented as a speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, Chicago, Illinois, October 15, 1958.
CHAPTER 11: PRELUDE TO AN ATTENTIONAL REVOLT
1. McDonald was a genuine longtime believer in “thought transference.” Thus when Duke University’s Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine published his research on telepathy, including one research project that seemed to demonstrate certain individuals were able to guess cards better than if they had by chance, McDonald sought to sponsor network radio experiments in Rhine’s technique, conducted by Northwestern University’s psychologists Dr. Louis Deal Goodfellow and Dr. Robert Harvey Gault. Each Sunday, the series The Zenith Foundation would broadcast on NBC, during which certain individuals would concentrate on cards. Radio listeners would then try to “pick up the senders’ thought waves.” Ultimately, Dr. Goodfellow concluded “no evidence of extrasensory perception in these experiments.” For more information, see Larry Wolters, “News of Radio,” Chicago Tribune, September 7, 1937; and “Patterns and Peephole,” Time, September 5, 1938, 16.
2. “McDonald v. the Adenoidal,” Time, February 4, 1946, 66.