The Depression-driven advertising crisis forced commerce into the home as a new attention source.

Evidence

As global advertising crashed in the 1930s, along with the rest of the economy, the industry was in existential crisis, and desperate to renew itself. With advertising’s usefulness now in question, the old channels of attention could no longer generate enough revenue to keep the advertising business viable. So it began to search for others, and its search led it into what turned out to be human attention’s mother lode. By means of new technologies, advertising and its master, commerce, would enter what had been for millennia our attention’s main sanctuary—the home. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 286

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: economic crises, not consumer demand, have historically driven the expansion of commercial attention harvesting into new spaces.
• XREF: Connects to the attention-economy history running through One Square Inch of Silence and the modern platform surveillance literature. — connects to: The Great Depression halved US advertising spending to a third of its pre-crash level — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1276; The Depression left consumers without money to respond to advertising pitches — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 282