When I was a youth subliminal advertising was seen as a little dishonest. I just had a flash thought about it and looked it up on the internets. It is live and well
While I don’t doubt that some of these are deliberate advertising maneuvers, I think the vast majority of them are either the result of overactive imaginations (the Camel guy thing, the Benson and Hedges “penis”) or of really bored artists sick and tired of drawing ice cubes for a living (the Coke blowjob, the masturbating flooring ad).
True subliminal advertising, IMHO, the kind that is rightly forbidden, is the millisecond ads of the 50’s advertising popcorn cut into a feature film that you wouldn’t even see as a flash, as the third image on your Google search reveals. That’s playing dirty. The rest are sort of “easter eggs” of advertising.
I disagree. Both are intended to develop a desire for a produbt by bypassing conscious thought. There are differences in degree, but seeing someone drinking a Coke in some movie (with the distinctive can color and swirl very visible.) isn’t really a matter of fulfilling the needs of the plot. It’s an attempt to remind the viewer that he/she likes Coke. All done without engaging the consumer’s conscious mind at all.
The true subliminal message - flashing a word, phrase, or picture for a frame on a film or TV show - is a more sophisticated version of that, but not different in kind from what product placement already does.
There’s no evidence, zero, none, that subliminal advertising even works, and plenty that it doesn’t. Look at this SkepDic article, this Snopes page, and thesetwo by Cecil himself. So I’m not sure what you’re concerned about, whether the subliminals you think you’re spotting are real or not.
Moreover, the first image in your link is about a prank played by a Coca-Cola advertising artist. Snopes covered that too. It’s not evidence of anything except the artist’s cheek.
Butt out. I never said it worked. I was thinking about it and looked it up. I found many examples and thought it was interesting. Many years ago it was looked at with suspicion and I have not heard of it in years. However when Bushes people managed to flash rat across the screen when their advertisement was running and mentioning Kerry ,it gave me pause. Apparently some body believed it worked.
It mentions the penis poking out of the guy’s shorts as an example of subliminal advertising–when in fact, according to snopes, no penis was even visible.
If there’s no evidence that it even works, I don’t see any reason to worry.
Well, I am not sure I am willing to so easily dismiss it as not working. Sure, as presented and usually understood it probably does not, but a large part of sales and marketing is essentially affecting what you think without you being aware of it. Human beings are not immune from influence and most influences that we are subjected to are what I would call subliminal. If we take consider Cialdini’s six means of influence: Reciprocation, Commitment, Social Proof, Authority, Liking and Scarcity, how many of those are actually explicitly perceived? I am willing to be dollars to donuts any marketing department worth their salt is using all six for every product.
Okay, you didn’t say it worked. But you did say it was “alive and well.” Do you have any recent examples of it other than the Bush ad? I checked the “examples” in the first page of your OP link, and almost all of the links were stories about subliminal advertising or galleries of very old ads with alleged subliminal messages in them, or in one case, it was the website of a company that sells the tools for making subliminal tapes.
Is the Bush ad your sole evidence that subliminal advertising is “alive and well?”
Somebody wrote a book about “subliminal advertising” way back in the '70s. In popular culture back then seems like it was usually but not always discussed in conjunction with “backwards records” ruining young minds.
One of the examples in the book was that Ritz Crackers had the word “SEX” baked into the surface of each cracker. I really doubt this, but it sold books anyway.
As a concept I don’t see any reason why hidden suggestions shouldn’t work at some nominal level. Advertising works well, or at least I assume the billions spent on it have some effectiveness. /s
But why bother hiding “sex” on a cracker (band name!), when there isn’t any shortage of overt semi-porn in full frontal glory, though maybe not 30 or 40 years ago.
A famous Madison advertising executive had a engraved bronze plaque in his office. It said “I never watch commercials”
He was David Ogilvy. Look him up on wiki. Or Read “Olgilvy on Advertising”. The man basically “created” advertising as we know it. Even though he id dead, “viral advertising” would not have surprised him …
He LOVED the fact that people paid little attention to TV/print ads, and used them to get a snack, have a pee, or what ever. He kinew one thing. You pay attention to ads not as interuptions, but as “duration”. You quit paying attention while they were on, or paged past them in magazines, newspapers.
In some small way you WERE paying attention to the ads… if only to ignore them.
He played on that… He used music (jingos), and repetition of names… knowing that you were not “paying attention”. Your conscious mind at least. but deep down you were getting that the end of “Its GREEEEEEAT!” meant that it was tiome to get back to Hawai five_0.
THAT, my friends is how sublimbinal advertising works
