The Attention Merchants Book Summary - The Attention Merchants Book explained in key points

The Attention Merchants summary

Name: The Attention Merchants
Rating: 4.3 (15 reviews)
Author: Tim Wu

Tim Wu

The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

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4.3 (15 ratings)

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What is The Attention Merchants about?

The Attention Merchants (2016) details the history of the fascinating field of advertising. These blinks will teach you all about the “attention industry,” offering a historical account of how advertising has arrived at its modern incarnation.

About the Author

Tim Wu is a policy advocate, law professor at Columbia Law School and frequent contributor to NewYorker.com. He’s the author of The Master Switch and head of the Poliak Center at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York.

Table of Contents

Key idea 1 of 7

Newspaper advertisements used to be strictly informational until one New York City paper changed the game forever.

Nowadays, if you look at a news source, whether online or in print, you’re just about certain to stumble upon a litany of advertisements. But this wasn’t always the case.

In fact, ads in the earliest newspapers, which date back to the start of the eighteenth century, were, for the most part, informational. They weren’t persuasive or loaded with gripping rhetoric; instead, they were simply there to impart facts. Much like the classifieds of today, they included vacancy notices, as well as a lost and found.

Then, in 1833, a young journalist and businessman named Benjamin Day changed everything. He set out to launch his own newspaper, called the New York Sun and, to reach a large audience, began selling each copy for just a penny. With rival papers like the New York Times, the Morning Courier and the New York Enquirer each selling for six cents per copy, Day’s paper was a much more affordable option.

However, selling a paper so cheaply was bound to generate a loss, as the cost of production would exceed the income from sales. To overcome this obstacle, Day invited businesses to place ads in his paper, charging them a fee for the exposure.

Within just a few months, the paper had become an enormous success, selling thousands of copies a day. By the end of the year, the advertisements were bringing in a massive surplus and, within two years, the paper was number one in New York City.

Day had shown, somewhat unintentionally, how a newspaper could be about more than just news; it could also do business and literally resell the attention of its audience.

Advertising was used to make a fortune on useless medicine and reinforce the British Army during World War I.

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 1920s, advertising and branding became more methodical.

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.

Radio and television were the successful attention-grabbers of the twentieth century.

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.

Email made it easier to reach people and grab their 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.

The internet offered a new opportunity to harvest attention, but it wasn’t immediately clear how to use it.

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.

Celebrities capture our attention like no other entity.

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.

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Who should read The Attention Merchants

Entrepreneurs and aspiring businesspeople
Veteran marketers, or those new to the industry
Tech industry employees, including programmers and developers

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The Attention Merchants summary

Listen to the first key idea

What is The Attention Merchants about?

About the Author

Newspaper advertisements used to be strictly informational until one New York City paper changed the game forever.

Advertising was used to make a fortune on useless medicine and reinforce the British Army during World War I.

In the 1920s, advertising and branding became more methodical.

Radio and television were the successful attention-grabbers of the twentieth century.

Email made it easier to reach people and grab their attention.

The internet offered a new opportunity to harvest attention, but it wasn’t immediately clear how to use it.

Celebrities capture our attention like no other entity.

Key ideas in The Attention Merchants

Newspaper advertisements used to be strictly informational until one New York City paper changed the game forever.

Advertising was used to make a fortune on useless medicine and reinforce the British Army during World War I.

In the 1920s, advertising and branding became more methodical.

Radio and television were the successful attention-grabbers of the twentieth century.

Email made it easier to reach people and grab their attention.

The internet offered a new opportunity to harvest attention, but it wasn’t immediately clear how to use it.

Celebrities capture our attention like no other entity.

Who should read The Attention Merchants

Categories with The Attention Merchants

Books like The Attention Merchants

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