Scale and accumulated expertise are what set the new firms apart from their predecessors. Just as the industrial revolution had transformed manufacture, and Ford's assembly lines pursued a never-ending quest for more efficient methods of mass production, so, too, did the new firms transform the casually intuitive and improvisational approach that had once been advertising into a machine for mass attention capture. Their campaigns were unending and exhaustive, like the British and American propaganda campaigns, which to some extent had solved the already recognized problem of disenchantment. As soon as one approach stopped working, a new one would be launched, in the ideal case stabilizing sales indefinitely.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 183