What is PRIZM and why is it uniquely significant?

In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu examines merchants who have been involved in an “epic scramble to get inside our heads” for more than a century. He observes: “As an industry, attention merchants are relatively new. Their lineage can be traced to the nineteenth century when in New York City the first newspapers fully dependent on advertising were created; and Paris, where a dazzling new kind of commercial art [e.g. posters created by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec] first seized the eyes of the person in the street. But the full potential of the business model by which attention is converted into revenue would not be fully understood until the early twentieth century, when the power of mass attention was discovered by any commercial entity but by British war propagandists.”

Of special interest to me is what he has to say about the development of two disciplines that have been essential to attracting the attention of prospective buyers and then creating or increasing demand: demographics and market research. For example, PRIZM:

“Working with public census data, and the relatively new Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) code created by the post office, Jonathan Robbin would produce his great masterpiece in 1978. He called it the ‘Potential Ratings in Zip Markets’ system, or PRIZM. PRIZM sorted the entire U.S. population into forty subnations or ‘clusters,’ each with a set of exact geographical locations. With PRIZM, a new reality revealed itself to Robbin: there was no United States, but forty distinctive nations all calling the same continent home.

“The notion of distinct social subsets within the borders of one country may seem obvious today. But at the time it gave the lie to an essential premise of marking and advertising: that Americans were a single people whose demands could easily be served by one set of consumer products. Even those single-variable parameters that had earlier served the limited efforts at more specific testing were obsolete. ‘Forget sex. Forget race. national origin, age, household composition, and wealth,’ wrote business author Michael Weiss, describing PRIZM. ’The characteristic that defines and separates Americans more than any other is the cluster.’” (Page 172)

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Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads was published by Alfred A. Knopf (October 2016).

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School, and best known for his development of Net Neutrality. He is also the author of The Master Switch and Who Controls the Internet? He previously worked for the White House under President Barack Obama and is a Silicon Valley veteran. He was a law clerk for the United States Supreme Court. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.), and Harvard Law School. Tim has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, T Magazine, Washington Post, Forbes, Slate magazine, and others, and once worked at Hoo’s Dumplings.
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