Introduction

In the United States, the advertising industry went through a period of modernization during the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century. The modernization encompassed the development of market practices and mechanisms to capture attention through a variety of media – newspapers and magazines, billboard, direct mail – and to measure, classify, and trade audience attention as a standardized commodity. Since attention is not, in the first instance, created for the purpose of being sold, it is an example of a fictitious commodity, as defined by Polanyi.