Foreseeing a much longer war than his colleagues did, one with heavy losses, Kitchener took the highly realistic view that Britain needed to do something it had never done before: raise a huge army of a million men at least. With conscription ruled out by tradition and policy, however, Kitchener had the idea to make a direct and personal appeal to the British public. And thus began the first state-run attention harvest, or what historians would later call the “first systematic propaganda campaign directed at the civilian population.”

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 127