Through its variously "scientific" techniques like demand engineering, branding, or targeting, the advertising industry had become an increasingly efficient engine for converting attention into revenue. It did so by beginning its now familiar practice of giving consumers, particularly women, a constantly receding ideal to strive after. Perhaps social practice had always done so, but now new strategies of attention capture were doing so in the service of commerce, an infinitely more insatiable and unyielding force than social convention.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 225