The Attention Merchants summary

It’s not exactly common knowledge, but early in the twentieth century, advertising for commercial over-the-counter medicine, or patent medicine as it was then known, was revolutionized. This shift was the work of Claude C. Hopkins, an innovative ad man and copywriter, then colloquially referred to as a “scheme man.”

For several years, Hopkins wrote ads for Dr. Shoop’s Restorative, a company that sold patent medicine. While there, he came up with a plan for “direct mail” advertising, what we now lovingly call “spam mail.”

In the years after World War I, advertising moved forward into a new age.

Twenty years into the twentieth century, a new term became quite popular: scientific advertising. It referred to a new view of advertising as a calculated practice involving specific approaches that could be sure to grab an audience’s attention.

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, advertising was primarily focused on public space. But as the 1920s came to an end, that all changed.

Radio advertising was becoming the new big thing, piping its message right into the homes of consumers. Sellers could now sponsor radio content like serial programs or orchestral performances that aired regularly. This was to the tremendous benefit of sponsors, since the mere mention of a company’s name was a great way to attract attention.

So TV transformed advertising in the 1950s, but it wouldn’t be long before a new ad revolution began to swell with the launch of the internet. This groundbreaking technology entered its infancy just two decades later, in the 1970s.

However, at its outset, the internet wasn’t very useful – it would take the invention of email to begin connecting people in a truly revolutionary way.

Google has become utterly ubiquitous in modern life, so much so that it has, of course, become its own verb. And it’s rise has been no accident.

Google was founded in the late 1990s, at a time when the internet was becoming more and more crowded and relevant content was becoming harder to find. It was nothing like TV, where you could easily move from channel to channel, knowing what you were looking for. Google thus made a name for itself as a way of solving this issue.

What do Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie all have in common besides their good looks? Well, since even those of us who pay zero attention to celebrities or movies will still know who they are, they all share tremendous worldwide recognition.

Celebrities are powerful attention harvesters around which a lucrative industry is centered. Consider the incredible success of People magazine, a publication focused solely on celebrities, published by the renowned Time-Life Inc. When the first issue of People hit the newsstands in 1974, it sold around 1 million copies.