When was subliminal advertising first used

As a diagnostic and therapeutic instrument, the tachistoscope helped identify and rectify extraneous action in the movement of eyes. As an experimental instrument, it helped to discover and measure optical and mental processes.

As a teaching instrument, it helped to accelerate recognition and memory, and provided a quantifiable performance indicator. As a speed-reading instrument, it disciplined eyes to take in entire fields of information rapidly. As a military instrument, it pushed target recognition into a reflex response. As a marketing instrument, it helped to streamline decisions about advertising copy and layout.

What is most clear through all of this is that subliminal advertising was a hot potato tossed here and there. Nobody wanted to claim it, own it, or admit to practicing it—most of all admen. There seemed to be no research showing that it produced results, and any association with it brought on the public's fear and wrath. It is an idea that might have, like Vicary, passed slowly into the status of "has been" on its road to oblivion.

The year had also witnessed the publication of Vance Packard's highly influential book, The Hidden Persuaders. In it Packard brought the many motivational research techniques of advertising and marketing to public attention for the first time.

These various techniques allowed advertisers and marketers to delve more deeply into consumer psychology than what could be learned by asking people questions directly about their likes and dislikes.

Packard discussed the use such things as measures of pupil dilation to monitor pleasurable responses to TV commercials, tracking changes in voice pitch to study positive or negative reactions to products, wired theatre seats that monitor squirming and thereby allowing researchers to chart boredom levels of viewers, and gauges of brain wave activities that assess degree of arousal created by ad imagery. Although such physiological responses to external stimuli had been recognized in psychological research much earlier, it was their application to marketing that concerned Packard.

His thesis was simple : We are being monitored, managed, and manipulated outside our conscious awareness by advertisers and marketers. Packard alerted consumers to early examples of product placement, which he considered to be a covert form of advertising.

He called on the public to wake up to the existence of motivational research and initiated a public debate on the morality of its uses. His revelations about hidden techniques and invisible pitches struck a responsive chord in the American public, all too recently disturbed by the so-called brainwashing techniques that had been used in the Korean War. Americans already had a general fear of brainwashing, spying, and invasion of privacy.

Packard's book further stoked it. By the s, Packard's claims, bolstered by the supposed popcorn experiment, made their way into psychology classes all over America. It became common knowledge that advertisers carefully constructed ads and researched responses to them even more painstakingly. Packard went on the public lecture circuit and testified before Congress. Professors included information from his book in their lectures.

And advertising and manipulation became almost synonymous in the public's mind. Packard Railed Against Advertising in Washington The advertising industry—like all trade and professional organizations—is made up of individuals and companies who compete with one another.

It is therefore unreasonable to expect there to be a single opinion or a single voice from such a diverse group. However, Advertising Age reported in its retrospective on subliminal advertising that the general response of most admen to the idea had been embarrassment and denunciation. Only a "brave few" admen had publicly stated that they would use such techniques if they could help their clients.

One response of the industry to subliminal advertising that began shortly after it appeared on the scene was to poke fun at it. Spoofing the idea showed the public that subliminal advertising was not a serious technique—only a joke about the serious work of promoting products.

For example, an early TV commercial from introduced the new model Chevrolet with playful reference to subliminal techniques of communication. The black-and-white commercial features Dinah Shore and Pat Boone, each of whom was a well-known, wholesome celebrity at the time. Dinah Shore had her own weekly variety show that was sponsored by Chevrolet.

Pat Boone was a popular recording artist whose records were top sellers. Together they made an earnest, trustworthy, wholesome team. The lyrics of the spot ask viewers if they know about the clever new way to communicate, explain it briefly, and finally encourage viewers to go to dealerships to have a good look at the new car. In the meantime, they say, viewers get an image flashed quickly on the screen three times as it turns out.

The image flashes too quickly to be examined in any detail, and thus a visit to the showroom is necessary. Although the song claims that the image is "subliminal," it is not really subliminal at all because it can be seen briefly and recognized as a Chevrolet. If it were a real subliminal message in the terms discussed above, it could not be perceived consciously nor would the advertisement speak directly about the subliminal communication.

Perhaps the most common responses of Madison Avenue to the idea of subliminal advertising in the late s were to ignore it, disclaim it, or laugh it off. What the industry did not do was launch any serious effort to counter the claims of Vicary, Packard, and others who were concerned about invisible, covert, and subliminal manipulations of consumers.

The public response from admen seems to have been to let the idea of subliminal advertising wither and die on the vine. There is some evidence that advertising agencies and large corporations, not wanting other agencies and corporations to get the jump on them, did investigate and invest in subliminal advertising. Several seem to have engaged the services of Vicary as a paid consultant.

However, there is no real evidence that advertising agencies—given the extremely negative public reception that subliminal projection had received—actually used subliminal techniques as a major means of communicating with consumers. By the end of the s, the brouhaha over subliminal advertising had diminished significantly. In the wake of Vance Packard's best-selling book had come David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man , an autobiography that talks specifically about overt, conscious, and apparently successful advertising techniques.

Nowhere in the book does Ogilvy even mention motivational research or subliminal techniques. Rather, he focuses on sharing his guidelines for producing winning advertisements.

In a chapter on great advertising campaigns, he gives his eleven commandments:. Don't be a copy-cat. These pieces of advice, drawn from Ogilvy's highly successful career, are straightforward. They are a distillation of what works for him.

When they are followed, secret or hidden manipulative techniques are irrelevant. That might have been the end of subliminal advertising, save for an enterprising college professor named Wilson Bryan Key who became a new champion of the idea. In , Key published a book entitled Subliminal Seduction , which as it turned out would be the first of five books published between and , each with essentially the same message.

The paperback edition of Subliminal Seduction contained what may be one of the most provocative book covers ever. It features a large, central photograph of a mixed drink—large ice cubes, a clear liquid such as a martini, and a twist of lemon in a drink glass—and with this caption in red letters: Are You Being Sexually Aroused by this Picture? Key's book was a best seller. Who could resist the pitch: an explanation of sexual arousal? The book contained a restatement of the claims of Packard and Vicary along with some new "evidence" from Key and his students.

Key argued that advertisers embed images of body parts like breasts and genitals, wild animals, and other stimulating or terrifying images in ads. These embeddings are not immediately obvious to readers, but they are picked up subliminally and interpreted by our unconscious minds. We are stimulated by them and ultimately motivated to purchase the advertised products and brands that use them.

Although Key discusses evidence from research findings and other sources that supports the idea of motivational research in general and subliminal communication in particular, his books are far from any systematic scientific investigation of the topic. For example, a typical experiment for him is to ask his students to relax and look at an image and then state the first thing that pops into their minds. Then they go looking for hidden images such as a dog's face, a phallic symbol, a human body—embedded in a pool of water, a cluster of foliage, or the ice cubes in a glass.

Key includes images drawn from advertisements that illustrate the process. For Key, this is clear evidence of the shenanigans of admen. A group of marketing students went looking for the producers of the Gilbey's Gin ad and published their findings in Advertising Age. Another example of this "deviousness" appears in Figure This Canadian ad for Jantzen swimwear features both a male and a female model wearing swimsuits whose design motif paid homage to the then relatively new Canadian flag.

To the innocent reader, it makes sense that bathing suit ads focus on the particular zone of the body that is covered. But Key warns, there is much more to this ad. If the ad is inverted then it is possible to see a face close to the woman's crotch.

The figure in the water is blowing directly into the woman's genital area, making the bathing suit much more appealing because it is not only sexy but about sexual stimulation itself.

An Image from Media Sexploitation It is examples like these that comprise Key's claims. They come from his ever-watchful eye and those of students whom he has trained to look for these embedded words and images. Key argues that by exposing these techniques we can diffuse their power over us.

BONUS : Disney's Lion King was also put into the spotlight as a freeze frame moment showed what appeared to be dust forming the word SEX , but now the widley accepted opinion is that it actually spells SFX, and was added as an easter egg by the SFX team, though nothing has ever been confirmed. One would expect to see the late US president George Washington in many places, from statues, to town names, on the side of a mountain, and on a dollar bill, but not on a dollar bill sneakily placed within the lettuce of a chicken burger, which is where he was sighted in in a KFC ad.

Conspiracy theorists assume that KFC wanted the viewer to assisioate a dollar bill with the a KFC Snacker burger - but it's all speculation. What do you think? Stay signed in. Forgotten password? Get the very latest news and insight from Campaign with unrestricted access to campaignlive.

Get the latest creative jobs in advertising, media, marketing and digital delivered directly to your inbox each day. Advertising Marketing. Close Join a growing community of media, marketing and advertising professionals today Read exclusive registrant only articles Read more articles each month Sign up for free specialised news bulletins Register Now Already Registered? Another provocative study showed that embedding images related to thirst in an episode of The Simpsons actually made people thirstier.

Those who saw the intelligence words performed better on a midterm one to four days later. Activity levels change in the amygdala, which processes emotions, the insula involved in conscious awareness , the hippocampus involved in processing memories and the visual cortex. Victoria Stern is a contributing editor at Scientific American Mind. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Their work suggested that subliminal advertising was only effective with products that people knew of and somewhat liked.

The flashes made the brand name more '"cognitively accessible", their theory went, so it wouldn't work with very high-profile brands - you couldn't make a brand like Coca-Cola much more familiar to people than it already is.

They replicated their results, and published their findings in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. But the crucial question, raised by Vicary's dubious claims, and never finally settled, is this - can you take all this out of the lab, beyond its strict controls, and reproduce it in the messiness of real life, on a mass scale?

No-one, apparently, has attempted this since the s. So, as part of a BBC Radio 4 documentary, we decided to carry out a public test. Working under the guidance of Stroebe, I devised an experiment in which 98 participants volunteered to take part. Stroebe and his colleagues' research suggested that if you knew subliminal advertising is at work, it was ineffective, so it was only afterwards that what was being tested was revealed.

Also, the Dutch research indicated that advertising a specific drink brand with subliminal flashes was only effective if the audience actually wanted a drink. So it had to be a brand that was perceived as thirst-quenching. So a pre-test survey was conducted to find a drink brand that might work. As with Stroebe's pre-test, the responses suggested that Lipton Iced Tea fitted the bill. When the volunteers arrived, they were given crisps in an attempt to make them thirsty.

They were sat in a theatre and divided into two groups, half with red blindfolds and half with black. The clip watched by the group with red blindfolds contained a millisecond flash, every five seconds, of the word "Lipton", using a technique developed by BBC Research and Development.

The participants, members of the audience of Radio 4's science show The Infinite Monkey Cage, were then offered a choice of two drinks - Lipton Iced Tea or a brand of mineral water - and asked to complete a questionnaire.