A periodically fashionable criticism made against advertising is that it manages to work at a subliminal, or subconscious, level, persuading innocent consumers to purchase goods that they otherwise would not. This was first “discovered” by a marketing researcher, James Vicary. In 1957, he conducted an experiment where the flashing of “Drink Coke” and “Eat Popcorn” messages flashed on a movie screen for 1/3,000 of a second, subliminally suggesting to cinema patrons that they should purchase goods at the concession stand.He eventually confessed the experiment was a hoax. The controversy was resurrected after the publication of several books by Wilson Bryan Key in the 1970s and 1980s that claimed that advertising’s subliminal powers were focused on hiding sexual messages in many commercials for everyday products.
Despite such claims, there is no scientific or conclusive evidence that shows that advertising can work subliminally, although scientists continue to study the unconscious workings of the brain. A 1996 experiment reported in the journal Science found that words flashed before individuals for a few milliseconds did influence their response to subsequent words presented to them, but that the effect lasted only for a matter of seconds and had no longer after-effects.
Some detractors would argue that it is contradictory to say that we can perceive something when it is presented below our threshold of perception. Many psychological studies that look into how people process advertising messages suggest that consumers, for the most part, take an active role in absorbing the information they read, hear, or see in advertisements.21 Most people will claim they themselves are unaffected by advertising, a phenomenon known as the third person effect. If you ask a group of college students whether their clothing purchases were affected by ads for Gap, most would probably say that they were not, but that those ads probably influence others to buy the product. In this way, they feel the ads have an impact on a third, or different, person. Yet a glance across a college campus will quickly show a large number of students walking around in Gap shirts and jeans.
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