Some claim that Vicary managed to pocket $4.5 million (or $45 million in today’s money) from gullible ad executives, and then disappeared. The manager also couldn’t recall any dramatic changes in popcorn or Coke sales. When a researcher visited the Fort Lee theater, the theater manager denied the experiment that had supposedly lasted six weeks ever took place.
SUBLIMINAL PERSUASION DRINKING MOVIE
Nobody has seen the results of Vicary’s movie theater experiment, nor the patent that he said he was filing. The entire affair is shrouded in mystery. When pressed to provide proof, Vicary refused (to protect his patent application, he said).Įven the CIA looked into the matter in 1958 and concluded that “there are so many elusive variables and so many sources of irregularity in the device of directing subliminal messages to a target individual that its operational feasibility is exceedingly limited.” Others – academics and practitioners – tried to get Vicary’s results in their own experiments. Before short, he got summoned before the FCC, where he was asked and to demonstrate the experiment, which failed to produce any results. Vicary’s successful publicity stunt backfired. Earlier that year, Vance Packard published his explosive Hidden Persuaders that exposed Madison Avenue’s efforts to turn consumers into puppets through motivation research and subconscious persuasion methods. The timing, in retrospect, could not have been worse. He called his method “subliminal advertising.” The next day, the news was in every major newspaper. The invisible commercial, Vicary claimed, had increased popcorn sales by 57.7% and Coca-Cola sales by 18.1%. The messages were flashed every 5 seconds for only 1/3000th of a second – too quickly to be noticed. The test that he said had ran for 6 weeks and involved 45,000 movie goers, involved projecting two advertising messages: to drink Coca-Cola and to eat popcorn. He showed a film and overlaid Coca-Cola messages using a device called tachistoscope – a kind of projector that can produce flashes that last fraction of a second.Īt the news conference, Vicary announced the result of a test he had just concluded at a movie theater at Fort Lee, New Jersey. There, Vicary announced his new invention that would, he said, change advertising forever.
Some 50 reporters from the US and Britain showed up, from such newspapers as Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Sunday Times, as well as the trade press: Printers’ Ink and Advertising Age.
In September 1957, a 42-year-old market researcher called up a press conference. The story of James McDonald Vicary is all of those. The history of advertising is a history of controversies, legends, clever scams, and even a few mysteries.
0 kommentar(er)
