Advertising converted attention into revenue by selling consumers a receding ideal

Evidence

Through its variously “scientific” techniques like demand engineering, branding, or targeting, the advertising industry had become an increasingly efficient engine for converting attention into revenue. It did so by beginning its now familiar practice of giving consumers, particularly women, a constantly receding ideal to strive after. Perhaps social practice had always done so, but now new strategies of attention capture were doing so in the service of commerce, an infinitely more insatiable and unyielding force than social convention. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 225

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the core thesis that ads monetize attention by manufacturing discontent, an enduring definitional frame for the whole modern attention industry.
• SEED: Could anchor an essay on how aspirational advertising’s promised ‘receding ideal’ became the template for the modern platform native-ad and influencer economy.
• XREF: connects to: Scarcity has shifted from production of goods to consumption of attention. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 41; Business models now give goods away free in exchange for user attention.; Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 43 (+10 more)