Walk on the wild side

Walk on the Wild Side:Subliminal Advertising

Ever been watching a movie and suddenly get the munchies? Or sitting on your sofa watching TV and suddenly get the irresistible urge to buy a new car? If so, you may be the victim of a subliminal advertising conspiracy! Proponents include Wilson Bryan Key (author of "Subliminal Seduction") and Vance Packard (author of "The Hidden Persuaders"), both of whom claimed that subliminal (subconscious) messages in advertising were rampant and damaging. Though the books caused a public outcry and led to FCC hearings, much of both books have since been discredited, and several key "studies" of the effects of subliminal advertising were revealed to have been faked. In the 1980s, concern over subliminal messages spread to bands such as Styx and Judas Priest, with the latter band even being sued in 1990 for allegedly causing a teen's suicide with subliminal messages (the case was dismissed). Subliminal mental processing does exist, and can be tested. But just because a person perceives something (a message or advertisement, for example) subconsciously means very little by itself. There is no inherent benefit of subliminal advertising over regular advertising, any more than there would be in seeing a flash of a commercial instead of the full twenty seconds. Getting a person to see something for a split-second is easy; filmmakers do it all the time (watch the last few frames in Hitchcock's classic "Psycho"). Getting a person to buy or do something based on that split-second is another matter entirely. (The conspiracy was parodied in the 1980s television show Max Headroom, in which viewers were exploding after seeing subliminal messages called "blipverts.")

 I won't claim no eager beaver account executive ever slipped a subliminal message into an ad,  but Wilson Bryan Key is the kind of guy who could find something suggestive in a dial tone. Revealing testimony on this score comes  from the Skeptical Inquirer. The images are just happenstance, the equivalent of seeing a face in the clouds.


 We Fall for "Tradition"

Some people believe that squeezing a lime into a Corona beer is a time-honored Mexican custom that came about to enhance the beer's taste. Others maintain that the ritual derives from an ancient Meso-American practice designed to combat germs, with the lime's acidity destroying bacteria. The truth? The Corona-and-lime ritual dates back only to 1981, when, reportedly on a bet with his buddy, a bartender popped a lime wedge into the neck of a Corona to see if he could start a trend.

This simple act, which caught on like wildfire, is generally credited with helping Corona overtake Heineken as the best-selling imported beer in the U.S. market.

 Shapes Have a Draw
A large food manufacturer once tested two different containers for a diet mayonnaise aimed at female shoppers. Both containers held the exact same mayo, and both bore the exact same label. The only difference? The shapes of the bottles. The first was narrow around the middle and thicker at the top and on the bottom. The second had a slender neck that tapered down into a fat bottom, like a genie bottle.

When asked which product they preferred, every single subject--all diet-conscious women--selected the first bottle without even having tasted the stuff. Why? The researchers concluded that the subjects were associating the shape of the bottle with an image of their own bodies. And what woman wants to resemble an overstuffed Buddha, particularly after she's just spread diet mayonnaise on her turkey and alfalfa sandwich?

 Subliminal advertising--hidden messages embedded in ads--is considered a deceptive business practice by the Federal Trade Commission. Yet a legal kind of "subliminal" persuasion happens every day. Shoppers are regularly encouraged to buy by appeals to their senses or unconscious assumptions. I believe it is plausible, some just tend to over do it.