"Research we've done seems to indicate that people who are on the Net like the idea that they don't have to leave what they are reading to go buy something"
About this Quote
E-commerce, in Jay Chiat's telling, isn’t a technological revolution so much as a victory for human laziness - or, more politely, frictionlessness. The line is deliberately unromantic: “Research we’ve done seems to indicate…” signals boardroom empiricism, but it also functions as a wink. Of course people like not being interrupted. Chiat is translating a basic truth about attention into an advertising strategy, and he does it with the casual confidence of someone watching a new medium swallow the old rules.
The intent is pragmatic: justify integrating commerce directly into the reading experience. Not adjacent to content, not after content - inside it. He’s describing what will become the web’s native grammar: clickable desire, a seamless handoff from curiosity to transaction, where the “buy” button is less a decision than the next sentence. The phrase “don’t have to leave” is doing the heavy lifting. Leaving is labor. Leaving is time to reconsider. Leaving is where skepticism lives. Keep the user in place and you keep them in momentum.
The subtext is more interesting, and a bit colder: the Net isn’t just a library; it’s a mall engineered to feel like a library. Chiat, a titan of late-20th-century advertising, is speaking at the moment when the internet is becoming legible to marketers - not as a utopian commons but as a pipeline for impulse. Read, click, purchase: the ideal loop, with “content” as the soft cover for commerce.
The intent is pragmatic: justify integrating commerce directly into the reading experience. Not adjacent to content, not after content - inside it. He’s describing what will become the web’s native grammar: clickable desire, a seamless handoff from curiosity to transaction, where the “buy” button is less a decision than the next sentence. The phrase “don’t have to leave” is doing the heavy lifting. Leaving is labor. Leaving is time to reconsider. Leaving is where skepticism lives. Keep the user in place and you keep them in momentum.
The subtext is more interesting, and a bit colder: the Net isn’t just a library; it’s a mall engineered to feel like a library. Chiat, a titan of late-20th-century advertising, is speaking at the moment when the internet is becoming legible to marketers - not as a utopian commons but as a pipeline for impulse. Read, click, purchase: the ideal loop, with “content” as the soft cover for commerce.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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