75 lines
4.4 KiB
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75 lines
4.4 KiB
Plaintext
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
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From: flaps@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal)
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Subject: Re: Subliminal Advertising (was: Little Me
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Date: 31 Mar 93 16:48:47 GMT
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>From The Straight Dope.
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On September 12, 1957, a market researcher named James M. Vicary called
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a press conference to announce the formation of a new corporation, the
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Subliminal Projection Company, formed to exploit what Vicary called a major
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breakthrough in advertising: subliminal stimuli. Vicary described the results
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of a six-week test conducted in a New Jersey movie theatre, in which a high-
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speed projector was used to flash the slogans "drink Coke" and "eat popcorn"
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over the film for 1/3000 of a second at five-second intervals. According to
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Vicary, popcorn sales went up 57.5% over the six weeks; Coke sales were up
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18.1%.
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Vicary's announcement immediately touched off something like a nationl
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hysteria. Outraged editorials appeared in major magazines and newspapers;
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outraged congressmen drafted laws and made themselves available for outraged
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interviews. This was the year of Vance Packard's best-selling expose of the
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advertising industry, _The_Hidden_Persuaders_, and the public was apparently
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willing to believe anything about Madison Avenue -- 1984 was just around the
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corner.
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Overlooked in all the hullaballoo were Vicary's own relatively modest
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claims for his invention. It was useful only as a reminder, he said, and
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couldn't persuade anyone to do what they didn't want to do in the first place.
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But even he was probably overstating the case. While Vicary steadfastly
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refused to release any of his data (or even the location of the theatre where
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the tests were conducted), psychologists who had performed similar experiments
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gleefully contradicted his results. A weak stimulus, they said, produced a
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weak impression; the subliminal "message" was no more hypnotic than a slogan on
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a billboard glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Moreover, Vicary's ideas
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were hardly new. A subliminal projector called a tachistoscope had been used
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during World War II in training soldiers to recognize enemy aircraft, while a
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book published in 1898 (_The_New_Psychology_ by E.W. Scripture) laid out most
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of the principles of subliminal response.
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Still, the panic over subliminal "brainwashing" continued. In January
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of 1958, Vicary agreed to conduct a publicly announced test over the Canadian
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Broadcasting Company stations. The message "telephone now" was flashed 352
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times during a half-hour show, but there was no noticeable increase in
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telephone use during or after the programme. Instead, the CBC received
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thousands of letters reporting unaccountable urges to get up and get a can of
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beer, to go to the bathroom, to change the channel -- not a single viewer
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correctly guessed the message. Since the technique apparently wasn't working,
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the advertising industry felt free to denounce it (and help repair some of the
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image problems brought on by Packard's book). Subliminal ads were banned by
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the American networks and by the National Association of Broadcasters in June
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of 1958. A proclamation that subliminal ads were "confused, ambiguous, and not
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as effective as traditional advertising" issued by the American Psychological
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Association finally laid the controversy to rest, one year almost to the day
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after Vicary's historic press conference.
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In 1962 Vicary granted an interview to _Advertising_Age_ in which he
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called his invention a "gimmick" -- the Subliminal Projection Company had been
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dissolved, and he was working in happy obscurity for Dunn and Bradstreet.
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Eleven years later, though, the subliminal pitch made an unexpected comeback.
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A commercial for a game called "Husker-Do" was found to contain the phrase "get
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it" flashed four times (one frame each) during its 60 seconds. The
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manufacturer, the Pican Corporation of Los Angeles, expressed horror and
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surprise, withdrawing the ads (which, of course, violated the NAB code) and
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writing the whole thing off to an overzealous copywriter in Cincinnati. But
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the company's scruples apparently didn't extend to countries where there were
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no regulations against subliminal ads: in 1974, the spots appeared on Canadian
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television. More outrage followed, and subliminal ads were quickly (if
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pointlessly) outlawed in Canada.
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--
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Now that I've typed that all in, could someone archive it?
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regards,
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Alan "words in quotation marks are not perceived consciously and thus can be
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construed as subliminal advertising: drink Coke" Rosenthal
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