AdNausea

As I was trolling Digg the other day, I came across an interesting post. My earlier blog about subliminal advertising gave readers a background about subconscious messages used in entertainment and advertising. And here is some more recent news about it.

Posted on 9/28/09,  BBC News reports that yes, in fact, subliminal messages do work. Most effectively, negative messages it seems. Three experiments were conducted at the University College in London where entrants were briefly shown hidden words and asked to classify these words as different emotions (good or bad) or as neutral.

Where does this come from? It seems that being able to pick up on and react to small cues that we sense subconsciously help us to avoid danger. This might be, obviously,  useful in marketing.

The actual experiment was conducted as such: 50 participants (which seems like a small number, to me) were shown a series of words on a computer screen. These words only appeared for a fraction of a second (way too fast for someone to actually see and read the word) and they were either positive words (like peace and flower) or negative words (like agony and murder) or they were neutral (like box and kettle). After each word, they had to choose whether the word was emotional or neutral and how sure they were of their answer. Most people categorized the word (without consciously seeing it) correctly when it was negative, even when they thought they were guessing at it. They accurately categorized 66% of the negative words and only 50% of the positive ones.

Don’t get too excited now. Critics of this experiment are saying that there is no grounded evidence that this same thing would happen outside a labratory. And I have to agree. This experiment was done on a rather small scale (only three runs of 50 people?) and was done with the participants knowledge of being tested for these. Anyone can guess something correctly 50% of the time, it’s just math. I’m excited to see where further experiments will take this study and what this may mean for subliminal messages in advertising. In all honesty, the world of advertising will be evolving to places we never thought imaginable and this may be a small step toward those bigger leaps.

What do you think?