From: "George A. Gleason" <gg@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 93 02:49:00 PDT
To: trebor@foretune.co.jp
Subject: Re: Subliminal Channels
Message-ID: <93Oct25.024352pdt.14124-3@well.sf.ca.us>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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One last point on subliminal advertising... (yeah this is a digress but
anyway)...

Subliminal stimuli can be considered an induction procedure for an
individual behavior change.  Nondrug inductions of every kind (i.e.
meditation, hypnosis, lucid dream techniques, concentration and memory
techniques, progressive relaxation, biofeedback training, etc....) produce
variable results on a population sample; typically the results fall along a
normal curve wherein some people are strongly affected, some are moderately
affected, and some are affected very little if at all.  

The relevance to advertising is, if a technique can reach perhaps 5% of your
readership and then cause 5% of those to alter their behavior favorably
toward your product, you've got a quarter of a percent of the market who at
least try your product once.  In the world of mass marketing, that small
number adds up.  If you were an ad executive, would you voluntarily give up
a tool that can add market share...?  

Also, the heaviest users of certain categories of products, notably alcohol,
are also people who are notoriously suggestible, in the sense that they are
already over-reacting to their environment and are using large amounts of
alcohol in part to self-medicate against that.  Heavy users of any product
are usually seeking to fulfill some psychological need, a secondary need
which can be manipulated far more easily than can the simpler needs of the
average consumers.  This increases the effectiveness of any
psychologically-loaded selling technique.  

I believe Key goes overboard in his own writings, but on the other hand I've
discovered so many examples of this kind of thing that there's no denying
it's going on.  Some of these are so blatant I can show the picture to an
untrained observer and say "what do you think of this?" and s/he immediately
spots the embedded item.  On the other hand, these days there are other
techniques, some far less subtle; for instance, the ads (particularly
billboards) for beverages which show them spurting ejaculatorily from very
phallic bottles... advertisers use anything which works, and that leaves a
whole lot to choose from.  

anyway, back to our regular channel...

-gg