To this point, with some experimental exceptions, the contest for human attention had been mostly approached as if everyone were roughly the same. But PRIZM revealed how the nation was actually a knowable mosaic of sensibilities and tastes—or even vulnerabilities and deepest desires. Here, at last, was a quantitative version of the shamanistic insight offered by Bernays and Dichter. For the advertising industry, it proposed a vast new horizon of targeted campaigns and additional billings. For the advertisers, it promised a more potent kind of messaging than the old scattershot method. Now, firms could not only tailor ads to their desired consumer but also fine-tune the product itself, so as to be more alluring to his or her specific attention. Here, too, was a way around the perennial attention industry problem of conditioned indifference; it is far more taxing to learn to ignore messages that seem to speak to you specifically.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 611