Trimble Unpacks Wu's View of Volume over Value

The epic scramble to get inside our heads – the subtitle of Tim Wu’s latest bestseller easily sums the book up. The Attention Merchants is about the bombardment of brands, messages, advertisements, and sponsored social media we have to endure in our daily lives. 

But it’s not so much about the history of advertising, as it is about the new technologies and formats that make it easier for media to infiltrate our lives. 

In this crazy, fantastic age of information technology and social media, new forms of media occupy our lives every day, presenting even more opportunities for these merchants to exploit our attention. From the invention oYou might also pick up the sensationalist and thinly negative tone in the subtitle – which rather represents Wu’s views on what he calls “attention merchants” or the companies that monopolise our attention. 

f mail to the attention monopolies of Google and Facebook; from celebrity power brands like Oprah to the explosion of social media, the basic business model of “attention merchants” have remained the same – free entertainment in exchange for our attention, which is then sold to a hungry advertiser. 

And like any good story, there’s struggle and mutiny. Wu describes the revolts that have risen against this uncompromising attack on our consciousness. The invention of the remote control was originally invented to be the first ‘ad-blocker’ allowing consumers to press ‘mute’. The scariest part is that these merchants are resilient, and they constantly find new ways to adapt and even take on countercultures – much like evil mutant superbugs that just get stronger. 

If it’s not apparent by now, Wu is not a fan of new media. “The idealists had hoped the web would be different,” he notes, “and it certainly was for a time, but over the long term it would become something of a 99-cent store, if not an outright cesspool.” 

Here the book mirrors the Orwellian view of media being ‘the rattling stick inside a swill bucket’ with not much new to offer. Yet, it strikes a nerve, for digital marketing in particular, the promise of cheap, highly measurable presence has led to volume over value. 

The constant intrusion into people’s on-line lives has eroded experiences and margins. Social media has also transformed into a paid-for game, creating a digital landfill of poor quality branded content. Meanwhile, the public is getting wiser to the constant extraction of data for free and misuse thereon. 

Meanwhile, there is evidence that Wu’s predictions around subversion are equally true. Witness Netflix whose success turns the model entirely on its head by investing in the most attention grabbing ideas around whilst remaining entirely advertiser free. 

So ‘attention merchants’ beware, there’s reason to revisit what this decade promised at the outset and where we may end up. Especially in a world where people have less means to buy, less trust in institutions, those that treat their attention with more respect may be the ones that win out.