Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention

Zoe Sherman is Assistant Professor of Economics at Merrimack College. Her scholarly writing has appeared in Rethinking Marxism, Forum for Social Economics, and other peer reviewed publications. Her popular writing appears regularly in Dollars & Sense magazine.

Preface Acknowledgements Chapter 1 — Introduction: Audience Attention as Commodity, Commodification as Historical Process - Audience Attention as Commodity - Commodification as Historical Process - Audience Attention as a Fictitious Commodity - Sectors of the Audience Attention Market - Mass media - Outdoor advertising - Direct mail - The Dramatis Personae - Who We the Advertisers? Why Did Their Sales Practices Change? - Who Were the Advertising Professionals? What Were Their Business Practices? - Who Were the Consumers? - The Drama - Conflicting and Complementary Interests - Engaging the State - Growth - Conclusion Chapter 2 — Packaging Readers: Newspaper and Magazine Advertising - Introduction - Newspaper Readers as an Incompletely Tapped Resource - Magazines, Mass Culture, and the Expanded Production of Audiences - Pricing Audiences and Dividing the Spoils - Increasing Efficiency and Intensifying Resource Use - Extensive Mining of Attention - Intensive Mining of Attention - Advertising Professionals Advocate Changed Business Practices for Advertisers and Publishers - Conclusion Chapter 3 — Pricing the Eyes of Passersby: Outdoor Advertising - Introduction - The Outdoor Advertising Supply Chain - Monopoly - Efficiency Gains: Lowering the Cost Per Gaze - Audience Compulsion - Material Inputs - Sequential Rents in Outdoor Advertising - Urbanization and the Governance of Public Space - Conclusion Chapter 4 — Home Invasion: Advertising Delivered Door-to-Door - Introduction - Mining Data to Compile the Mailing List - Social Barriers to Data Collection - The Mailing List as Asset and as Commodity - Mailing List Operating Costs - Creative Content - Paper - Printing - Addressing and Mailing - Technologies and Labor Processes in the Information Economy - Encoding Information - Office Workers - Mechanized Information Processing - Audience Control - Approaching the Supply Chain as Supplicant or Disciplinarian - Disciplining the Profession - Conclusion - Chapter 5 — Conclusion: Multimedia Demands on the Resource of Attention - Advertising of All Sorts - Billboards vs. Newspapers - Decade of conflict: the 1890s - Détente: after 1900 - Direct Mail Enters the Fray - New Media Since 1920 - Contested Property Rights in Attention - Attention Ownership Claims of the Interceptors - Attention as a Common Resource - Living in the Attention Commons