What will I learn about: Learn how the 1833 launch of the penny press pioneered the modern business model of selling a product at a loss to harvest and resell audience attention to advertisers?

Learn how the 1833 launch of the penny press pioneered the modern business model of selling a product at a loss to harvest and resell audience attention to advertisers.

What will I learn about: how early advertising techniques like free samples and direct mail successfully sold useless medicines and were even repurposed as propaganda to recruit millions for World War I?

Discover how early advertising techniques like free samples and direct mail successfully sold useless medicines and were even repurposed as propaganda to recruit millions for World War I.

What will I learn about: the 1920s concept of 'demand engineering,' where advertisers fabricated problems like 'halitosis' to create massive consumer demand for their products?

Understand the 1920s concept of 'demand engineering,' where advertisers fabricated problems like 'halitosis' to create massive consumer demand for their products.

What will I learn about: how the concept of branding emerged as a deliberate strategy to engineer a stellar corporate reputation overnight, rather than earning it through decades of hard work?

Find out how the concept of branding emerged as a deliberate strategy to engineer a stellar corporate reputation overnight, rather than earning it through decades of hard work.

What will I learn about: Explore how the advent of radio shifted advertising from public spaces directly into consumers' homes, allowing brands to sponsor regular content and capture captive audiences?

Explore how the advent of radio shifted advertising from public spaces directly into consumers' homes, allowing brands to sponsor regular content and capture captive audiences.

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The Attention Merchants

The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

Tim Wu

★ 4.5 / 5(20 ratings)

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Psychology Marketing & Sales

If You're Curious About These Questions...

You should listen to this audiobook

💡Did you know that the global advertising empire we see today actually began with a single 19th-century newspaper sold for just one penny?
💡Have you ever wondered why modern technology is so effective at hijacking your focus, and who is actually profiting from every second of your scrolling?
💡What’s the secret to how 'Attention Merchants' successfully transformed our private thoughts and free time into the world's most valuable commodity?

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Key Takeaways from The Attention Merchants

✓Learn how the 1833 launch of the penny press pioneered the modern business model of selling a product at a loss to harvest and resell audience attention to advertisers.
✓Discover how early advertising techniques like free samples and direct mail successfully sold useless medicines and were even repurposed as propaganda to recruit millions for World War I.
✓Understand the 1920s concept of 'demand engineering,' where advertisers fabricated problems like 'halitosis' to create massive consumer demand for their products.
✓Find out how the concept of branding emerged as a deliberate strategy to engineer a stellar corporate reputation overnight, rather than earning it through decades of hard work.
✓Explore how the advent of radio shifted advertising from public spaces directly into consumers' homes, allowing brands to sponsor regular content and capture captive audiences.

Learning Tools

Reinforce what you learned from The Attention Merchants

Mind Map

The Attention Merchants

Core Premise+

The Print Era+

Early 20th Century+

Scientific Advertising (1920s)+

The Broadcast Era+

The Digital Age+

Celebrity Culture+

Quiz — Test Your Understanding

Question 1 of 8

How did Benjamin Day fundamentally change the newspaper business model with the New York Sun in 1833?

A. By selling the paper at a loss and making a profit by charging businesses for ad exposure.
B. By introducing sensationalist headlines to sell more copies than his higher-priced competitors.
C. By transitioning newspaper ads from persuasive rhetoric to strictly informational classifieds.
D. By inventing the first subscription-based model for daily news delivery.

Question 2 of 8

What key advertising innovations did Claude C. Hopkins use to sell patent medicines like Liquozone in the early twentieth century?

A. He used clinical-sounding terms to invent new diseases for the medicine to cure.
B. He utilized direct mail advertising and introduced the concept of free samples to lure customers.
C. He partnered with the British government to distribute the medicine as a patriotic duty.
D. He sponsored early radio soap operas to broadcast the medicine's benefits to millions.

Question 3 of 8

The 1920s introduced 'demand engineering.' How did Listerine successfully utilize this scientific advertising approach?

A. By engineering a superior toothpaste formula and challenging competitors to clinical trials.
B. By associating their brand with high-status celebrities to engineer a luxury reputation.
C. By popularizing the clinical term 'halitosis' to make people fear bad breath and buy their product as the solution.
D. By sponsoring prime-time television programs to reach a captive audience every night.

Question 4 of 8

What realization did advertisers in the 1920s have regarding a company's reputation, as demonstrated by the Cadillac brand?

A. A good reputation takes decades of hard work and rigorous product testing to establish.
B. Reputations are best built by offering the lowest possible price to consumers.
C. Consumers only trust a brand if its advertisements are strictly informational and fact-based.
D. A brand's reputation can simply be deliberately engineered and broadcast without waiting to earn it over time.

Question 5 of 8

Why did the toothpaste brand Pepsodent begin sponsoring the serial radio program 'Amos ‘n’ Andy'?

A. To reclaim market share after the public learned their product contained no actual cleaning agents.
B. Because the government mandated that health products sponsor educational programming.
C. To transition away from print media, which was becoming too expensive for daily advertising.
D. Because the radio hosts personally endorsed the product, making it the first influencer campaign.

Question 6 of 8

According to the book, why is email so effective at capturing and holding human attention?

A. It provides a sense of professional obligation that forces people to constantly check their screens.
B. It operates on B.F. Skinner's principle of operant conditioning, acting as an unpredictable reward.
C. It uses targeted algorithms to only show us messages we are explicitly interested in.
D. It taps into our innate desire to follow the lives of celebrities and high-profile individuals.

Question 7 of 8

How did Google's founders choose to monetize their search engine without compromising its unbiased algorithm?

A. By charging users a monthly subscription fee for ad-free search results.
B. By selling user data to third-party direct mail marketers.
C. By allowing companies to buy the top search result spots for any keyword.
D. By creating Adwords, a system that only displays advertisements relevant to a user's specific interests.

Question 8 of 8

Scholars suggest that our deep fascination with celebrities, which makes them powerful 'attention harvesters,' is most closely related to:

A. Our evolutionary need to identify the strongest leaders in a society.
B. Traditions of worship and the human desire to transcend the banality of life.
C. The psychological principle of operant conditioning and variable rewards.
D. The widespread use of scientific advertising to manufacture demand for movies.

The Attention Merchants — Full Chapter Overview

1Recommendation
2Newspaper ads were once purely informational, until a single New York City daily ultimately changed everything forever.
3Advertising was used to build fortunes on worthless remedies and to bolster the British Army during World War I.
4During the 1920s, advertising and branding grew increasingly methodical.
5Radio and television were the twentieth century’s most successful attention-grabbers indeed.
6Email made it simpler to reach people and capture their attention.
7The internet created a new chance to harvest attention, but it wasn’t immediately clear how to use it.
8Celebrities command our attention like no other entity.

The Attention Merchants Summary & Overview

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.

Who Should Listen to The Attention Merchants?

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

About the Author: Tim Wu

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.