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Overview

It’s hard to imagine a world without advertising. Ads are everywhere, from the subway to television and even on our phones. It’s become so common that we don’t notice it anymore.

Advertising has changed over the years. The advertising departments of today are very different from those in the days of cigar-smoking, cocktail-drinking ad men you may have seen on Mad Men. However, despite these differences, they still share a common goal: get people to pay attention and then piggyback on that attention.

In this chapter, we will look at the various attention-grabbing products that have successfully attracted people. We’ll also learn about branding and social media. We’ll see how these things work together to make us feel the way we do about certain brands. You will learn why celebrities are so influential in our lives and why they hold such a strong pull on us.

Big Idea #1: Newspaper advertisements used to be strictly informational until one New York City paper changed the game forever.

Advertising is prevalent in today’s media. It’s a given that you’ll be bombarded with advertisements if you look at news sources online or in print. This wasn’t always the case, though.

In the early days of newspapers, ads were mostly just informational. They weren’t persuasive or filled with gripping rhetoric; instead, they simply delivered facts. Like the classifieds of today, they included notices about vacancies and a lost-and-found section.

Then, in 1833, a young journalist and businessman named Benjamin Day decided to start his own newspaper. He wanted to reach a large audience and make it affordable for everyone. So he set his price at one penny per copy, which was much cheaper than the six-cent papers of that time.

However, the paper was sold at a loss because of the cost of production. To make up for this deficit, Day invited businesses to place ads in his paper and charged them for the exposure. Within just a few months, he had become enormously successful and within two years; it became number one in New York City.

Day showed how a newspaper could be more than just news. It can also sell things and resell its audience’s attention to advertisers.

Big Idea #2: Advertising was used to make a fortune on useless medicine and reinforce the British Army during World War I.

It’s not widely known, but in the early twentieth century, advertising for over-the-counter medicine was revolutionized. Claude C. Hopkins, a copywriter and ad man at the time, was responsible for this shift.

For several years, Hopkins wrote ads for Dr. Shoop’s Restorative, a company that sold patent medicine. While there, he came up with the idea of spam mail to advertise their product.

After that, he went to Chicago. There, Douglas Smith recruited him and asked him to advertise his product. The product was a patent medicine called Liquozone. It promised to cure just about everything from coughs to cancer and malaria; however, it turned out not be as useful as advertised. Nonetheless, Hopkins made millions of dollars in revenue by giving away free samples of the useless medicine during 1904-1904.

But attention harvesting wasn’t just a way to make money. It was also used in World War I when the U.S. government wanted to recruit soldiers for their army.

Britain needed reinforcements for its military. It had a few hundred thousand people in the army compared to Germany’s 4.5 million soldiers, who were successful on the battlefield.

So, the British army used posters to recruit more soldiers. They plastered the country’s buses, buildings and telephone poles with posters that declared the country’s need for army volunteers to ensure its survival. The plan worked perfectly and by 1915 around 2.75 million men had enlisted of their own free will.