The most confident among the advertisers knew that the 1960s would not extinguish consumerism, for a simple reason: desire's most natural endpoint is consumption, and advertisers, after honing their art for half a century, knew how to convert all manner of desire into demand for products. And young people's desires were no exception. In fact, as one advertising executive, John Adams, put it in 1971, "They [the hippies] are in the peak acquisitive years, and their relative affluence enables them to consume goods and services at a rate unheard of for their age level."

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 565