Audience backlash against attention capture can trigger industry-wide regulation and reinvention

Evidence

But the revolts can also take another, more dramatic form that is central to our story. When audiences begin to believe that they are being ill-used—whether overloaded, fooled, tricked, or purposefully manipulated—the reaction can be severe and long-lasting enough to have serious commercial consequences and require a significant reinvention of approach. Almost like a financial bubble bursting, a mass public revolt can reconfigure the industry or inspire regulatory action. That is what happened in Paris, where the anti-poster movement began to lobby the city to impose restraints on where advertisements might be placed, to impose taxes on posters to limit their spread, and to ban billboards along the train tracks. Since it was France, the issue was always stated as an aesthetic concern, but as so often, behind aesthetic concerns there was something deeper at work. Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent. Perhaps that feeling of violation was what Ogilvy felt when he wrote that “when I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 72

Categorization

• SEED: The Ogilvy masked-vigilante poster-chopping quote is a memorable hook for an essay on advertising backlash and the aesthetics of refusal.
• XREF: connects to: Attention merchants must manage advertising volume to avoid audience resentment. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 358; Audience measurement ceded programming control to ratings rather than taste or decency — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 494; Competition among attention merchants drives content to ever more lurid extremes. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 49 (+3 more)