Concept
Subliminal Advertising
advertising-history perception myth
The idea that people can be influenced to buy something by messages presented too briefly or faintly to consciously register. The claim entered public consciousness via consultant James Vickery, who told author Vance Packard (in Packard's 1957 bestseller The Hidden Persuaders) that he had flashed the words "eat popcorn" and "drink Coca-Cola" into a cinema screening for 1/3,000th of a second, boosting popcorn sales by 57% and Coke sales by 18% (see Vickery Subliminal-Cinema-Ad Hoax).
The claim was fabricated. An investigative journalist later visited the cinema Vickery said he'd run the study in and found no record of him or any matching description of the venue. Vickery appears to have invented the results to promote his own consulting business.
The panic it caused had a lasting, damaging effect on the entire field of applied psychology in marketing. 1950s America — steeped in Cold War fears of brainwashing and mind control — reacted to the (false) claim with genuine alarm; the UK banned subliminal advertising outright that same year, a ban that remains in place today, and Germany still bans it on television and radio. In the fallout, advertising agencies that had previously employed prominent psychologists like Louis Cheskin became wary of any association with psychology at all, and the use of behavioral science in marketing was set back for decades — not resuming in earnest until roughly the early 2000s.
Actual research on subliminal messaging finds it works, but only weakly and only in narrow conditions. A 2006 study by Johan Karremans found subliminal messages promoting an iced-tea brand shifted brand choice in favor of the brand — but only among participants who had first been made thirsty by a salty meal; the same message had no effect on non-thirsty participants (see Karremans Subliminal Iced-Tea Thirst Study). Ordinary, fully visible ads for the same product were far more persuasive than the subliminal version. The American Psychological Association's summary: subliminal stimuli can reinforce an existing behavior or motivation already present, but cannot create a new attitude or desire from nothing — a genuinely thirsty person might be nudged toward a specific drink, but nobody is subliminally persuaded to buy a product they have no underlying interest in, let alone join the navy.
Discussed in
- Episode 143 — 143-does-subliminal-advertising-work