Giving Them a Piece of Our Mind

Zoe Sherman’s Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention gives historical substance to the theory that advertisers are buying the commodity of audience attention. Attention, she maintains, was commodified as the American advertising business assumed its modern institutional form during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Her study is notable for extending beyond print media to outdoor and direct-mail advertising. Based in trade publications and other primary sources, the study notes the complicated institutional relations among advertisers, agents, and media. These relations usually favor big-budget advertisers, but attention is a slippery commodity, difficult to measure or control. Sherman uses Karl Polanyi’s concept of fictitious commodities to explain attention as a phenomenon that is inherently ill-suited for full commodification.