AIDA (E. St. Elmo Lewis, c. 1898)

The original advertising funnel: a message moves the reader through four ordered stages — Attention, Interest, Desire, Action — where each stage is a gate for the next. Not a formula; a sequence constraint.

Where superseded. Criticized as linear, one-directional, and blind to everything after the click (repeat, advocacy, non-linear discovery). Lavidge & Steiner's hierarchy-of-effects split its coarse rungs; dagmar demanded measurable objectives AIDA never specified; the decision-journey loop replaced its one-way arrow.

Transfer. The ordering is the usable core, and it is exactly what agent-produced content violates. Attention is the strict prerequisite — no Interest, Desire, or Action fires if the first line fails to arrest — yet AIDA assumes attention it doesn't have to earn. For an agent, that unearned "A" is the whole problem: slop dies at the gate AIDA takes for granted. You cannot manufacture Desire in a reader who skipped Interest, so front-load the hook and never bury the payload below the fold.

Kin: hierarchy-of-effects, dagmar, monroe-motivated-sequence, models, being-seen-reliably