The Attention Merchants

* Some economists contest the idea that demand can be created by advertising, despite the empirical evidence. Whether “wants” can be created may just depend on how you define them. One might be said to be born wanting “beautiful things,” and advertising merely identifies for you what is beautiful. Or one can more easily say that advertising shapes or creates demand.

Learning how to think . . . means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

—DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

For the advertisers, by far the most valuable function of advertising, then, is the shaping or creation of demands that would not otherwise exist.

Consumers make their blunder-ing way, so many Alices in the Wonderland of salesman-ship; they buy not what they freely want, but what they are made to want.

Theodore MacManus was the dean of this soft-sell approach, credited with building brands like Cadillac, Dodge, Chrysler, and General Electric. Born in Buffalo, New York, and raised as a devout Catholic, MacManus mostly frowned on the harder-edged reason-why approaches favored by his Protestant rivals. As for Claude Hopkins, his main intellectual rival, MacManus viewed him as an unscrupulous con artist who seemed to believe that “all men are fools.”

It was, upon inspection, really just a dressed-up term for a few basic approaches.7 The first was creating the desire for products that otherwise might not exist—then known as “demand engineering.”

During the war Bernays worked, like many journalists, on the Creel Committee, and like Lippmann, he emerged with a sense of the futility of democracy.

truly independent thought. In most areas of life, we necessarily rely on others for the presentation of facts and ultimately choose between manufactured alternatives, whether it is our evaluation of a product or a political proposition. And if that is true, in the battle for our attention, there is a particular importance in who gets there first or most often. The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.

This ability—to block out most everything, and focus—is what neuroscientists and psychologists refer to as paying attention.8

engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention,