Reply #11: Subliminal Seduction [View All]

[Ian David]

Subliminal Seduction
Skeptoid #63
August 28, 2007
Podcast transcript

<snip>

Right around the time that Packard's original book was published, a market research consultant named James Vicary set up a special projector inside a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Over the course of six weeks, he chose certain showings of the film Picnic and throughout those showings, he flashed certain marketing messages onto the screen for .003 seconds (well below the perceptual threshhold), and kept doing it every five seconds through the entire movie. In all, 45,699 customers watched Vicary's movies. The messages said "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Hungry? Eat Popcorn". The result? During movies when Vicary flashed his messages, sales of Coca-Cola rose by an average of 18%, and sales of popcorn rose by 58%.

And so there it was. Since that famous experiment, subliminal messages flashed on TV and movie screens have been a firm fixture in popular culture. Hardly a single student who takes a class on psychology or advertising will escape hearing about it and believing wholeheartedly in the effectiveness of subliminal messaging. The media had a heyday with the sensational headlines, and the rest is history.

Harcourt Assessment, which was known at the time as The Psychological Corporation, invited Vicary to repeat his experiment under controlled conditions. He did, but this time no increases in sales were shown at all. Pressed for an explanation, Vicary confessed that he had falsified the results from his original study. Indeed, five years later in a 1962 interview with Advertising Age, Vicary revealed that he had never even conducted the Fort Lee experiment at all. He had literally made up the entire thing. But of course, by then, it was too late. The headlines had run their course, and to this day it's a generally accepted fact that flashing brief messages onscreen produces a desired behavior, despite the fact it never happened.

Is there any evidence that subliminal messages or hidden sexual imagery produces higher sales? Evidently, no. At least, I couldn't find any. However I did find one relevant study from 2007, from the University of California Davis. The findings, surprisingly, were that subliminal sexual images had no effect on men, and actually produced lower levels of sexual arousal in women. Neither group went out and bought popcorn or Pepsi. The conclusion suggests "that the subliminal sexual prime causes women to activate sex-related mental contents but to experience the result as somewhat aversive." Not really a great advertising strategy.

More:
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4063