Britain printed 54 million government war posters by the end of WWI.

Evidence

A special Parliamentary Recruiting Committee was created in the fall of 1914 to run a “permanent ‘information’ campaign”—an institutionalized effort to develop ways of keeping the recruitment emergency foremost in the minds of Britons. The campaign’s most useful tool turned out to be a French invention we have seen before, the giant illustrated advertisement. Beginning in the final months of 1914, the country was blanketed in government war posters, and by 1916, the recruitment authority would calculate that it had printed nearly 12.5 million of them. By the war’s end, it would print some 54 million. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 138

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘French invention’ — the giant illustrated advertisement — is the payoff of earlier chapters’ treatment of advertising’s origins, showing the state borrowing commercial attention-harvesting techniques. — connects to: Governments manufactured WWI public opinion by controlling information flow — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 167

Broader Connections

• Governments manufactured WWI public opinion by controlling information flow #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 167