![]() Bush ran an ad aimed at his opponent, Al Gore, in which the word “RATS” was flashed in large white letters for a small fraction of a second. During the 2000 presidential election, for example, the campaign of candidate George W. The concept of subliminal advertising has remained a part of our culture, sometimes the source of paranoia, sometimes the subject of comedy - and sometimes the inspiration for serious efforts at persuasion. The admission came too late to erase the idea from the American psyche. ![]() But advertisers, the FCC, and research psychologists were skeptical, and in the Advertising Age article Vicary admitted that he had never conducted the subliminal “experiment” - it was concocted as a gimmick to attract customers to his failing marketing business. The press, always thirsty for a sensational story, loved Vicary’s. Vicary had claimed that he arranged for the words “drink Coca-Cola” and “eat popcorn” to be flashed briefly on screen every five seconds during screenings of the film “Picnic.” Though the duration of each flash was too short for anyone to consciously detect, Vicary said that that this subliminal exposure boosted Coke sales by 18% and popcorn sales by 58%. Vicary’s hoax revolved around a movie theater in Fort Lee, NJ. The surprise all these decades later is that Vicary wasn’t far off base after all. Vicary had made his claims a few years earlier - just after the end of the Korean War, an era in which ideas like mind control and brainwashing had found a place in the public consciousness. ![]() This year marks the 50th anniversary of an article in Advertising Age magazine in which a marketing consultant named James Vicary admitted to perpetrating one of the great hoaxes in psychological science: the idea of subliminal advertising. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |