Pacifying attention-space: Marketization and the U.S. outdoor advertising industry, 1931–1941

This article examines the production of U.S. outdoor advertising markets in the 1930s through an analysis of the early procedures of the Traffic Audit Bureau (TAB). TAB was established in 1933 through the joint effort of three advertising industry professional organizations to standardize the measurement, auditing, and publication of outdoor advertisement circulation measures—estimates of addressable urban audiences in the U.S. and their “exposure” to outdoor advertisements. These measures served as the basis of exchange between sellers and buyers on the outdoor advertising market. I argue that TAB’s procedures worked to stabilize the production of circulation measures, and thus the market for outdoor advertising, through the intertwining of (urban) space and (mobile) attention as attention-space . Specifically, I contend that the success of TAB’s work hinged upon processes of pacification which abstracted and standardized urban attention-space to produce comparable circulation counts. I begin by introducing the concepts of pacification and diagrams before discussing the state of the U.S. outdoor advertising industry and markets circa 1933. The subsequent sections analyze several of TAB’s foundational documents and procedures. I demonstrate how these procedures framed attention-space by analyzing how the Bureau (1) used circulation counts to establish the extents of urban retail areas; (2) determined appropriate coverage allotments of advertisements throughout an urban area; and (3) evaluated the relative visibility of poster panels.