Dear Cecil:
Do you know anything about "subliminal advertising"?
Supposedly, they can flash a message, like "Buy right now!", real
quickly in a commercial, so we viewers don't know it, but it
registers in our subconscious and we do what we're told. Is this
technique really used? Does it work? --J.C., Phoenix
Dear J.:
On
September 12, 1957, a market researcher named James M. Vicary
called a press conference to announce the formation of the a new
corporation, the Subliminal Projection Company, formed to exploit
what Vicary called a major breakthrough in advertising: subliminal
stimuli. Vicary described the results of a six-week test conducted
in a New Jersey movie theater, in which a high speed projector was
used to flash the slogans "drink Coke" and "eat popcorn" over
the film for 1/3,000 of a second at five-second intervals.
According to Vicary, popcorn sales went up 57.5 percent over the
six weeks; Cokes sales were up 18.1 percent.
Vicary's
announcement immediately touched something like a national
hysteria. Outraged editorials appeared in major magazines and
newspapers; outraged congressmen drafted laws and made themselves
available for outraged interviews. This was the year of Vance
Packard's best-selling expose of the advertising industry,
The Hidden Persuaders, and the public was apparently
willing to believe anything about Madison Avenue--1984 was just
around the corner.
Overlooked in all the hullaballoo were
Vicary's own relatively modest claims for his invention. It was
useful only as a reminder, he said, and couldn't persuade anyone to
do what they didn't want to do in the first place. But even he was
probably overstating the case. While Vicary steadfastly refused to
release any of his data (or even the location of the theater where
the tests were conducted), psychologists who had performed similar
experiments gleefully contradicted his results. A weak stimulus,
they said, produced a weak impression; the subliminal "message"
was no more hypnotic than a slogan on a billboard glimpsed out of
the corner of the eye.
Moreover, Vicary's ideas were hardly new. A
subliminal projector called a tachistoscope had been used during
World War II in training soldiers to recognize enemy aircraft,
while a book published in 1898 (The New Psychology by
E.W. Scripture) laid out most of the principles of subliminal
response.
Still, the panic over subliminal "brainwashing"
continued. In January of 1958, Vicary agreed to conduct a publicly
announced test over the Canadian Broadcasting Company stations. The
message "telephone now" was flashed 352 times during a half-hour
show, but there was no noticeable increase in telephone use during
or after the program. Instead, the CBC received thousands of
letters reporting unaccountable urges to get up and get a can of
beer, to go to the bathroom, to change the channel--not a single
viewer correctly guessed the message.
Since the technique
apparently wasn't working, the advertising industry felt free to
denounce it (and help repair some of the image problems brought on
by Packard's book). Subliminal ads were banned by the American
networks and by the National Association of Broadcasters in June of
1958. A proclamation that subliminal ads were "confused,
ambiguous, and not as effective as traditional advertising" issued
by the American Psychological Association finally laid the
controversy to rest, one year almost to the day after Vicary's
historic press conference.
In 1962 Vicary granted an interview to
Advertising Age in which he called his invention a
"gimmick"--the Subliminal Projection Company had been dissolved,
and he was working in happy obscurity for Dunn and Bradstreet.
Eleven years later, though, the subliminal pitch made an unexpected
comeback. A commercial for a game called "Husker-Do" was found to
contain the phrase "get it" flashed four times (one frame each)
during its 60 seconds.
The manufacturer, the Pican Corporation of
Los Angeles, expressed horror and surprise, withdrawing the ads
(which, of course, violated the NAB code) and writing the whole
thing off to an overzealous copywriter in Cincinnati. But the
company's scruples apparently didn't extend to countries where
there were no regulations against subliminal ads: in 1974, the
spots appeared on Canadian television. More outrage followed, and
subliminal ads were quickly (if pointlessly) outlawed in Canada.
--CECIL ADAMS
"Copyright 1999 Chicago Reader Inc. Reprinted with permission. The
Straight Dope by Cecil Adams is a registered trademark of the Chicago
Reader, Inc."
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