Advertising as Exception versus Rule

Advertising as Exception versus Rule

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

James Williams's claim is that advertising was historically an exception to a medium's rule of information delivery, the newspaper adverts and not the articles, the billboards and not the street signs, and that digital media did not blur that boundary but inverted it. Where advertising once underwrote a medium's design goals, in digital media it overwrites them with its own. The two words are the whole idea. It is an argument about media economics rather than a research finding, and Williams says so himself, twice, in the book's first third.

What it is

The claim sits in chapter 5 of Stand Out of Our Light, titled "Empires of the Mind", pp. 26 to 40. The mechanism Williams gives is specific and is the part that does the work. Advertising's historical weakness was that nobody could tell whether it worked, and the internet closed that loop, so analytics systems built to manage advertising data, among them Omniture, Coremetrics and Google Analytics, established the engagement metrics of advertising, clicks, impressions and time on site, as the default operational metrics of websites themselves. That extended the design logic of attention-oriented advertising to the design of the entire user experience. The book is open access under a Creative Commons licence, which is why the passage can be reproduced rather than paraphrased.

In effect

The causal chain runs backwards from what most readers assume. Advertising needed a measurement, the measurement became available, and then the measurement escaped the advertisement and became the product's own success criterion. That is the best available answer to the question of why a company would grade itself on a number that is not a description of value to anybody using the product, which is that the number was never meant to be one. It was an advertising metric and it got promoted. Williams's own remedy follows from the diagnosis, which is that advertising should serve intentions rather than capture attention.

What it does not say

It does not say native advertising is the mechanism. Williams raises native advertising by name in the inversion passage in order to set it aside, because his claim is about instrumentation rather than camouflage, so an article that uses the recognition literature to support him has reversed his argument rather than illustrated it. It is also not a history. His account of what sat on product dashboards rests on his recollection of having worked at Google, disclosed in one sentence and never specified by job title, team, product, date or document, and every number in that chapter comes from market research, trade press and company announcements while being typeset exactly like peer-reviewed work. He disclaims scientific standing twice in his own words, calling the book more exploration than argument and quoting Emerson to the effect that sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. Cite him for the frame and never for a finding about readers.

Sources

  1. Williams, J. (2018). Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108453004. Open access under Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 at Cambridge Core, confirmed on the book's landing page on 18 October 2026, which is why the passages may be quoted at length with attribution and the DOI.
  2. Chapter 5, "Empires of the Mind", pp. 26 to 40, where both halves of the claim and the analytics mechanism appear. The Cambridge Core HTML edition carries no page breaks inside a chapter, so no page is printed for either passage.
  3. The two disclaimers that travel with the book: Preface, pp. xi to xiii, and chapter 6, "The Citizen is the Product", pp. 43 to 49.
  4. Wu, T. (2016). The Attention Merchants. The vault's source for anything historical about the format, because the archival work is there and this book's is not.