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Subliminal Advertising: Does it work? Date: Sent Friday, July 19, 2002 Category: None

Rating: 1.53/5 (111 votes) Click a button to cast your vote

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Q. Does subliminal advertising work?

A. That's an interesting question. (Send us money.)

The American public was first introduced to the idea of subliminal advertising in 1957 by James M. Vicary. In a press conference announcing the formation of the Subliminal Projection Company, Vicary claimed that he was able to increase sales of popcorn and Coke through the use of subliminal advertising. (Send us lots of money.)

According to Vicary, during a six-week test in a movie theater, he was able to drive up sales of popcorn by 57.5% and sales of Coke by 18.1% simply by flashing the slogans "drink Coke" and "eat popcorn" over the movie for 1/3,000th of a second every five seconds.
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As plausible as his assertions might have been, there was little evidence to support them. (Send us money.) For one thing, Vicary refused to reveal where he conducted his experiment or document it in any meaningful way. What's more, psychologists who performed similar experiments concluded that a subliminal ad was no more compelling than a billboard glimpsed from the corner of the eye.
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In an effort to vindicate his claim, Vicary agreed to run the subliminal message "telephone now" during a Canadian broadcast. Like other documented cases, the experiment failed. Telephone usage didn't increase noticeably, and not a single viewer guessed Vicary's message.
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While neither this experiment nor previous experiments disproved conclusively the effectiveness of subliminal ads, American broadcasters were so convinced of the ineffectiveness of subliminal messages that they simply volunteered not to run them.
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BTW, If you're still unconvinced and would like to see more research on the subject, you'll be happy to know that we're running our own little subliminal experiment. We can't tell you about it now, but in the coming weeks we'll reveal our findings.

By the way, if you ever need to reach us--for any reason--our mailing address is:

GCFL
Box 100
Harvest, AL 35749, USA

(Source: THE STRAIGHT DOPE Column by Cecil Adams)

Received from Shirley.