p2pnet - rss feed: Subliminal advertising might work
p2pnet.net news:- Back in the 70s, subliminal advertising was big. The idea was: plant messages which wouldn’t be perceived overtly, but which would be picked up subconsciously.
Last September Sophos, a UK security firm, said it had identified an animated .gif in a spam campaign designed to artificially inflate the price of shares in a company called Trimax.
The graphic briefly flashed a message saying “BUY!!!” approximately every fifteen seconds, the message being,m “comparable to the subliminal messages that have occasionally been used in advertising and political broadcasts to try and subconciously influence people”.
Now a British study shows how subliminal advertising, banned in the UK but still legal in the US, might work, says Guardian Online.
But, “Using brain scans, a team from University College, London, showed people only registered the images if the brain had ’spare capacity’,” says the BBC.
“If the brain is busy … it can filter out those subliminal things,” Guardian Online has Dr Bahador Bahrami, whose research is published today in Current Science, saying.
“His study challenges an assumption of psychology - that attention and consciousness go hand in hand. ‘We knew the brain responds to subliminal messages but we don’t know whether that response is automatic or is affected by whether the brain pays attention’.”
This is the first time researchers have provided physiological evidence of the impact, says the BBC, going on to quote Bahrami as stating:
“What’s interesting here is that your brain does log things that you aren’t even aware of and can’t ever become aware of. The brain is open to what’s around it. So if there is ’spare capacity’, in terms of attention, the brain will allocate that resource to subliminal activity.
“These findings point to the sort of impact that subliminal advertising may have on the brain. What this study doesn’t address is whether this would then influence you to go out and buy a product.”
p2pnet wondered, “Can we soon expect to see messages from the RIAA and MPAA saying, ‘You’re a criminal and a thief - turn yourself in’ as a new form of DRM buried in ads planted on sites associated with file sharing? They’d do it if they thought it’d work ;p”
Bahrami will carry out more research to evaluate the further impact of subliminal words and images, says the BBC.
Also See:
Guardian Online - Brain absorbs subliminal messages - if not too busy, March 9, 2007
BBC - Subliminal images impact on brain, March 9, 2007
wondered - Subliminal spamming, September 11, 2006
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
December 13th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
As a matter of fact, Dr Bahador Bahrami’s research is not a case of “Subliminal Advertising”. His research is centered around some specific cognitive processes connected with attention and consciousness.
Furthermore, the “Subliminal way” is but an illusion and is not supported in neither advertising research nor consumer decision making research. If you are interested in the subject you can read this post:
http://iloblog.stics.se/yard?Home&post=2
Marketing has since long ago come to understand that there are way more efficient ways to influence consumers.
//Patrik
Stockholm Institute of Communication Science
www.stics.se
December 13th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
The perhaps closest effect with any similarity with “Subliminal advertising” is ‘mere exposures’ discussed by for instance Mandler, Nakamura and van Zandt (1987) and also by Monahan, Murphy and Zajonc (2000). In their studies, repetition of ‘mere exposures’ may have the potential to produce a kind of vague feeling of familiarity that later could be interpreted as liking. Their studies are though, not studies of “Subliminal advertising”.
//Patrik
http://www.stics.se
Ps. The example you are referring to with the “BUY”-text that is flashing every 15 seconds is not sublimnal at all. It is very visible, i.e. liminal.