Subliminal advertising — myth or chance?

The idea to influence consumers without their awareness about it is not new. The tactic of targeted subliminal advertising has been controversial for many years.

Fraud and myth

Special attention was paid to the issue in 1957, when James M. Vicary was able to somehow demonstrate significant success in an experiment with a very short and therefore almost imperceptible implementation of the slogans “ Drink Coca Cola” and “ Eat popcorn” in a movie (Karremans, Stroebe, and Claus 2006). He reported an increase in sales of Coca Cola by 18.1%, while sales of popcorn increased by 57.7% (Brand 1978). However, some time after the publication of the results, it turned out that the experiment had never taken place and was only a public relations coup for Vicary’s marketing company (Bermeitinger et al. 2009; Pratkanis 1992). But even if a fraud was revealed at this point, most people still believe that subliminal manipulation is possible (Block and Vanden Bergh 1985; Merikle 1988; Synodinos 1988).

The current importance of the topic could have been observed, when there was some anger about a seemingly subliminal advertising attempt at the German TV show “ The Voice of Germany “ at the channel ProSieben (gutefrage.net 2012; Sieke 2012).