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"Subliminal advertising" and other bunk

NWO Sentryman

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I noticed that some people (particularly in the Documentary "The Age of Stupid") make a claim that our thoughts are controlled by advertising companies to get us to buy their stuff. This sounds like a rehashed Conspiracy Theory to me.

Here's some background.

In the 1950s, a man named James Vicary created an experiment in a cinema. the audience was shown a film with supposed subliminal messages to get them to buy refreshments. In it, he claimed to get people to buy refreshments via subliminal messaging. However, there are problems such as were people thirsty or hungry? Were they convinced by other factors such as cost or quality? Or even how many actually did buy the stuff? He later admitted this to be a hoax in the 1960s.

In the 1980s, you had claims that Devil Worshippers were converting children to satanism via rock music. The Claimants state that "Backmasking", or hidden code revealed when playing backwards, supposedly had satanic language. Some Rock musicians did this as a joke to show that it was completely bunk. Even Gore Tipper bought into the claims of backmasking.

As well as that, it reminds me of Sigmund Freud's now discredited theory o the Id the Ego and the Superego.

Source: Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/funny-2179-subliminal-messaging/ (Warning: NSFW diagram at the start)
 
I believe the scientist who did the first study on subliminal advertising was found to have skewed the results to prove that subliminal advertising worked. You can read about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Vicary

In my personal opinion, I don't think subliminal advertising works. Why? The point of advertising is to make your product known. Being subtle goes against the idea of advertising in general.
 
As I understand it, the claim is that subliminal messages work because they work directly on the subconscious. Some techniques that have are supposed to have this effect are images flashed on television or movie screens for a very short time, hidden images, and audio messages played backwards. However, I'm not aware of any good evidence that these messages are perceived at all (except, perhaps "hidden" images), let alone that they actually influence behavior in any way.
 
Wilson Bryan Key was the person who popularized the theory that there was subliminal seduction going on all around us -- in advertisements, on magazine covers, even in paintings going back centuries. While there were experiments with subliminal advertising in the '50s and '60s which received some comment, it was his books Subliminal Seduction (1973) and Media Sexploitation (1976) which really got this idea talked about and widely believed in.

I picked up a free copy of Subliminal Seduction not long after it had come out and was intrigued by the claim that comic book artists worked the letters S-E-X into the artwork on comic book covers in order to boost sales. As an occasional comic book reader* that seemed like something I could check fairly easily.

Wilson is right. The letters S-E-X can be found hidden in the artwork of many comics (and other magazine) covers. It can be found in the artwork of many newspaper and magazine advertisements. It can be found in photographs appearing in newspaper and magazine stories. It can be found in paintings by some of the grand masters of past centuries. It can even be found in the pattern in wood grain floors.

That's because the 3 shapes which make up those letters -- a squiggle, a c-shape with a line coming out the middle, and two lines crossing -- occur extremely commonly in any sufficiently large collection of lines. So while there are indeed cases where comic book artists had fun inserting hidden images into their artwork, there are also many more cases in which a person searching for those particular shapes in close proximity to each other will find them even when no one deliberately inserted them.

That's why the most common example Key is able to provide in his books is instances in which the word S-E-X appears. (But he has to do a bit of fancy talking to explain why that particular spelling appears in art even in cases where the word sex was not part of the language of the person creating the work.)

Both these paperbacks include inserts of photos of various advertisements Key found, and many of these are much more interesting than the S-E-X examples. The books are fun to read, and there probably is a smattering of truth underlying them. (There are, for instance, documented cases where comic book artists deliberately inserted hidden images into artwork. It just isn't the routine practice which Key suggests, and isn't done for the reasons he suggests.)

I could be wrong -- it's been a couple of decades at least since I last re-read any of his books -- but I believe Key also included some stuff on back-masking (inserting backward-spoken messages in sound recordings) in the second book. He wouldn't have been the first to suggest that particular idea -- it dates back at least to the Is Paul Dead? business with the Beatles -- but again he was one of the people who helped popularize the idea in the public mind.


* I had a minimal habit back in those days, certainly not more than 40 or 50 a month.
 
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Snopes has a short and reasonably informative item on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of subliminal advertising, which touches on both Vicary and Key (and Vance Packard's book, The Hidden Persuaders, as well.)

Claim: an early experiment in subliminal advertising at a movie theater substantially increased sales of popcorn and Coke.

Status: false.
Click to expand...


The Snopes piece is mainly concerned with the subliminal movie theater ad incident. It doesn't mention a later subliminal advertising incident (one which I recall Key making much of) -- Christmas 1973 commercials for Husker Du.

Anyway -- while there is factual basis to the attempt to use subliminal advertising in both these cases, there is (as Snopes details) no good reason to believe the advertising was particularly effective. Which isn't surprising, when you think of how few people have ever heard of Husker Du. If subliminal advertising actually worked, it ought to be right up there with Monopoly in name recognition.
 
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Our thoughts are not "controlled" but we certainly being manipulated by advertisement! That's what they are for!

The subconscious part of advertising is not about hiding a frame in a movie or a naked woman in the reflection of an ice cube, it's about using connotations, emotional response, and creating associations in the mind of the viewer.

A bad ad will go out of its way to say "Pepsi is cool".

A good ad will just make you think "This is cool for some reason" while you also notice the brand.

"Subliminal advertising" in the form of hidden things in pictures exists and always will simply because hiding Easter eggs is fun and sometimes coincidences happen too.
 
The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations
http://www.amazon.com/Father-Spin-Edward-Bernays-Relations/dp/0805067892



documentary Century of Self

http://www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoftheSelf_0


Read the book and watch the documentary and you’ll come away with a different point of view. They’re about a man who is relatively unknown to the public named Edward L. Bernays who took propaganda, advertising and spin to new levels of expertise and effectiveness. This man has impacted the masses in very huge ways that we aren’t even aware of.

He figured out how to effectively and discretely manipulate the sheeples without them even knowing it. That includes you and me. He was also the nephew of Sigmund Freud. That's where he got a lot of his ideas
 
The classic masterpiece of American Cinema "They Live" laid out a very convincing case for the existence of subliminal advertising.

I'm sold.
 
I guess it depends on what you consider "Subliminal". That pretty, sexy girls help sell a product, has been known and used since modern advertising began. We have examples of that going back to the 1890's .
 
Here's one I always like to post in threads like this. These are simply two of literally dozens of examples I have.

17149c25a957cc57.jpg
 
alfaniner said:
Here's one I always like to post in threads like this. These are simply two of literally dozens of examples I have.

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/17149c25a957cc57.jpg[/qimg]
Click to expand...


So the subliminal message is, if you smoke these smokes your genitalia will be painfully mutilated?

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Persuaders-Vance-Packard/dp/097884310X

Here's the bad boy that started it all by bring this to the public's attention. In it is a picture of some young couples camping and a comely young lass is kneeling down looking up at her boyfriend as he stands over her and he is holding a coke bottle by his crotch that pointed down like it was his dick. This created quite a stir back then. "It still does for me", said the typical male very sheepishly.:blush:
 
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