Belief in advertising’s power grew from salient successes despite weak proof

Evidence

That greater intensity came in part from the disappearance of doubts as to advertising’s power to drive sales, making audience attention more valuable. While scientific proof of the conversion of attention into sales may have been lacking, the examples of successful campaigns were too numerous to be ignored. Reeves’s commercials for Anacin (“Fast, fast, fast relief”) correlated with a 200 percent increase in sales over eighteen months. A new brand named Crest stormed the toothpaste battlements with a special ingredient, “fluoride,” and a happy boy crying, “Look, Mom! No cavities!” It became the market leader in just four years’ time. Television and print ads of the Marlboro Man, as we’ve seen, turned an obscure woman’s cigarette into one of the market leaders in less than a year, and Revlon was widely thought to be saved by The $64,000 Question. Of course, it is possible that Crest was just making great toothpaste, or that Marlboro just happened to take off. Certainly, for every successful advertising campaign there were plenty of others that seemed to have no impact. Nonetheless, the number of notable successes was sufficient to set off a feeding frenzy. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 488

Categorization

• QUESTION: This anecdote-driven belief in ad power despite lacking proof recurs throughout the book’s narrative. Worth tracing where the first systematic evidence of ad effectiveness actually arrived.
• SEED: Could ground an essay on how salient success stories (not rigorous evidence) drive industry investment spirals — in advertising or any hype cycle.
• XREF: connects to: Unmeasurability of viewership protected advertising from hard scrutiny. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 632; Belief perseverance persists even when evidence establishing it is shown false — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2586; The dot-com crash stemmed from advertisers’ inability to prove online ads worked — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 891 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Unmeasurability of viewership protected advertising from hard scrutiny. #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 632
• Belief perseverance persists even when evidence establishing it is shown false #qualifies (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2586