On October 5, 1957, some three weeks after Vicary’s event, Norman Cousins, editor in chief of the Saturday Review, wrote an article called “Smudging the Subconscious,” in which he lambasted ad campaigns designed to “break into the deepest and most private parts of the human mind and leave all sorts of scratch marks.” The Central Intelligence Agency soon issued a report on the operational potential of subliminal perception. The idea that ads might be broadcast subliminally, below the threshold of conscious awareness, seemed akin to brainwashing. Vicary’s findings played directly into a popular fear at the time that Madison Avenue could manipulate consumers like mindless puppets. As proof, he presented data indicating that the messages had increased soda sales at the theater by 18 percent and popcorn sales by 58 percent. Vicary argued that these messages were too fast for filmgoers to read but salient enough for the audience to register their meaning subconsciously. Over the course of six weeks during the preceding summer, he had arranged to have slogans-specifically, “Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola”-flashed for three milliseconds, every five seconds, onto a movie screen in Fort Lee, N.J., while patrons watched Picnic. On September 12, 1957, Vicary called a press conference to announce the results of an unusual experiment. Vicary, an independent marketing researcher. ![]() In this real-life story, the spotlight falls on James M. ![]() The birth of subliminal advertising reads almost like a script from a television show.
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