Large agencies industrialized advertising into an endless machine for attention capture

Evidence

Scale and accumulated expertise are what set the new firms apart from their predecessors. Just as the industrial revolution had transformed manufacture, and Ford’s assembly lines pursued a never-ending quest for more efficient methods of mass production, so, too, did the new firms transform the casually intuitive and improvisational approach that had once been advertising into a machine for mass attention capture. Their campaigns were unending and exhaustive, like the British and American propaganda campaigns, which to some extent had solved the already recognized problem of disenchantment. As soon as one approach stopped working, a new one would be launched, in the ideal case stabilizing sales indefinitely. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 183

Categorization

• XREF: Builds the throughline to later attention-platform chapters via the propaganda linkage already established earlier in the book. — connects to: Unconscious automatic attention makes brand messages imprint without our awareness — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 362; The alertness regime dominates the mediasphere because it captures advertiser attention fastest. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 134; The war technostructure outsourced demand creation to the attention industry — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 150 (+8 more)
• QUESTION: The ‘problem of disenchantment’ solved by propaganda — worth tracing how this concept recurs in later attention industries.

Broader Connections

• Measuring attention as data enables treating it as a monetizable resource #expands (0.80)
• Technology-enabled attention extraction both creates the crisis and reveals attention’s true importance #exemplifies (0.72) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 265