Does Subliminal Advertising Really Work?

Hidden messages promoting products in films once caused moral fear and outrage. But is this controversial technique effective?

The BBC’s Phil Tinline helped create an experiment to find out.

On 12 September 1957, at a studio in New York, a market researcher called a press conference.

James Vicary astonished the assembled reporters by announcing that he’d repeatedly flashed the slogans ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ and ‘Eat popcorn’ throughout a movie, too fast for conscious perception. As a result, he claimed, sales of popcorn had risen 18.1% – and Coke by 57.7%. This, he declared, was ‘subliminal advertising’.

Vicary thought his fellow Americans would be thrilled. Annoying cinema and TV ads could now be replaced with imperceptible flashes. But on both sides of the Atlantic, his announcement sparked fear and outrage. ‘Welcome, to 1984’ wrote one American magazine.

It didn’t stop there. The manager of the cinema involved told Motion Picture Daily that the experiment had had no impact. In 1962, Vicary finally confessed that he hadn’t done enough research to go public and that he regretted the whole thing.

More recent experiments have shown that subliminal messages actually can affect behaviour in small ways.

A Harvard study conducted in 1999 used a similar method to Vicary’s — subjects played a computer game in which a series of words flashed before them for only a few thousandths of a second. One group was exposed to positive words; wise, astute, and accomplished. The other group received negative words; senile, dependent, and diseased.

Even though these words flashed far too quickly to be consciously perceived, those who received positive words exited the room significantly faster than those with the negative words.

Would you consciously include subliminal messages in your ads? And, if the answer is yes, would it actually affect your audience’s buying decisions?

Read more about Vicary’s experiment here.

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