Advertising, Subliminal

The word subliminal comes from two Latin words, “sub,” meaning “below,” and “limen,” meaning “threshold.” If something is subliminal, then, it is something that is “below the threshold”—here, below the threshold of conscious experience. Subliminal advertising, then, is advertising that operates below the limits of the consciousness of its audience. Subliminal advertising operates by including text or images into the overt, perceived advertising product that will not themselves be consciously perceived but will appeal to basic and universal human needs, such as for food, sex, security, or status. Such advertising messages are sometimes referred to as “hidden” or “embedded” messages.

The potential use of subliminal techniques has been recognized since 1898, with the publication of a book by E.W. Scripture called The New Psychology. The public awareness of subliminal advertising, however, was stimulated by two events that occurred in 1957. The first of these was a widely publicized experiment that James Vicary, the person who coined the term subliminal advertising, claimed to have performed at a Fort Lee, New Jersey, movie theater during the summer of 1957. Vicary claimed to have placed a tachistoscope in the projection booth of the theater and then to have used it to flash messages onto the screen every 5 seconds during the showing of the movie Picnic. (A tachistoscope is a shutter fixed to a projector that can flash slides onto a screen at speeds down to 1/125th of a second.) The messages that Vicary claimed to flash onto the screen were “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Hungry? Eat Popcorn.” Vicary claimed that these messages resulted in an 18.1% increase in Coca-Cola sales and a 57.8% increase in popcorn sales. The second event that popularized the idea of subliminal advertising was the 1957 publication of Vance Packard's book The Hidden Persuaders, which outlined how advertising draws on knowledge of human psychology to motivate persons to purchase goods—including the possible use of subliminal techniques. Packard, however, was skeptical of the efficacy of subliminal advertising and did not use the term subliminal in The Hidden Persuaders. Indeed, even Vicary expressed the view that subliminal messages could only remind people to do what they would have done anyway and could not be used to motivate people to perform actions that they would not have otherwise done.

Yet despite Packard's skepticism and Vicary's modesty, between 75% and 80% of the American public believes in the existence and efficacy of subliminal advertising, according to Martha Rogers and Kirk Smith, in a survey whose results were published in the March 1993 edition of the Journal of Advertising Research. Moreover, according to the same source, consumers spend $50 million a year on subliminal self-help products. Such confidence in the power of subliminal advertising is partly owed to the success of a series of three books written by Wilson Bryan Key—Subliminal Seduction, Media Sexploitation, and The Clam Plate Orgy—in which he discusses various alleged uses of subliminal advertising. For example, Key claimed that the word sex was embedded on the face of Ritz crackers through the placement of holes on them and that the same word was embedded on the ice cubes of a drink shown in a well-known advertisement for Gilbey's gin. A similar case of the alleged use of subliminal advertising occurred in 1990, when Pepsi Cola withdrew one of its “Cool Can” designs after complaints that the random lines on the cans would spell the word sex when two cans were stacked on top of each other. Regulators have also taken the power of subliminal advertising seriously. In 1974, for example, the Federal Communications Commission issued a report saying that the use of subliminal advertising was contrary to public interest. More recently, in 2000, two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and John Breaux, requested that the Federal Communications Commission review the Republican National Committee's advertisement that was run against [Page 21]Senator Gore's prescription drug plan. If the film was slowed down, they claimed, the word “Rats” appeared in large white letters superimposed over the words “The Gore Prescription Plan.”

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