“Please describe the origins of subliminal advertising.”

Certainly Kris. The term “subliminal advertising” was coined to describe advertisements on television and in movie theaters that include extremely short duration text messages or images that are embedded into the advertisement to provoke a subconscious response from the consumer. Such messages are limited in duration by the refresh rate of television systems, but can be made much shorter with films by using a separate projector to flash extremely short duration messages.

The single test case that claimed to demonstrate the power of subliminal advertising was later exposed as a fraud, because the person performing the test falsified the results of the test. An audience at a theater was exposed to very short duration messages flashed onto the screen, encouraging people to purchase certain food products.

The theory was that people would subconsciously absorb the content of these messages (e.g., “Buy Sudz, it’s a great detergent”) and respond by selecting the product in stores. Testing has never demonstrated any such correlation. However, the level of fear generated by the concept of subconscious persuasion was so high that subliminal advertisements were strongly discouraged, even though they were rarely used, apart from testing audience reaction, and did not produce the desired results.