Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [32]
Then there are those advertisers who openly use subliminal advertising. In 2006, KFC ran an ad for its Buffalo Snacker chicken sandwich that, if the viewer replayed it in slow motion, revealed a code that consumers could enter on the KFC Web site to receive a coupon for a free Snacker. Though ostensibly aimed at countering a rise in ad-skipping technologies such as TiVo by giving viewers an incentive to actually watch the commercial, KFC was nevertheless using hidden messages (if the commercial was played at normal speed, the codes weren’t consciously perceptible) to promote their product.7 Other advertisers have found a way to make split-second impressions work, but don’t call them “subliminal” anymore. By the 1990s, they’d taken on a new name: “primes” or “visual drumbeats.” In 2006, Clear Channel Communications introduced “blinks,” radio ads that last about two seconds, on their commercial radio network. For a blink advertising The Simpsons, for example, listeners hear Homer yelling “Woo-Hoo!” against the show’s theme music before an announcer breaks in: “Tonight on Fox.”
And if political candidates have become brands (which I believe), then subliminal advertising, or priming, is even alive and well in political messaging. One recent example is a 2000 ad produced by the Republican National Committee in which George W. Bush criticizes Al Gore’s prescription drug plan for senior citizens. Its tagline: “The Gore prescription plan: Bureaucrats decide.” Then, toward the end of the ad, the word rats flashes in oversized letters for a split second while an off-screen voice reiterates the phrase, “Bureaucrats decide.” The Bush campaign claimed that the ad’s producer must have accidentally “botched the hyphenation of ‘Bureaucrats,’ placing ‘Bureauc’ and ‘rats’ in different frames.”8 George W. Bush dismissed the controversy as “weird and bizarre,” but after claiming it was “purely accidental,” its creator, Alex Castellanos, later confessed that the word rats was a visual “drumbeat designed to make you look at the word ‘bureaucrats.’”9
Then, in 2006, there was the Harold Ford incident. Ford, a light-skinned black man, was running a close senate race in Tennessee against white Republican Bob Corker. In what could only be interpreted as an explicit—if subliminal—attack on Ford’s race, Corker and the Republican National Committee produced an ad in which every time the narrator talked about Ford, African tom-tom drums beat, just barely audibly, in the background. The kicker lay in the final words: “Harold Ford: He’s Just Not Right.” One could infer that what the Republican National Committee actually meant was “he’s just not white.”
Clearly, subliminal advertising pervades many aspects of our culture and assaults us each and every day. But does it actually exert any influence on our behavior, or does it, like most product placements, get essentially ignored by our brains? That’s what the next part of my study would find out.
IN 1999, HARVARD University researchers tested the power of subliminal suggestions on forty-seven people from sixty to eighty-five years old. The researchers flashed a series of words on a screen for a few thousandths of a second while the subjects played a computer game that they were told measured the relationship between their physical and mental skills. One group of seniors was exposed to positive words, including wise, astute, and accomplished. The other group was given words like senile, dependent, and diseased. The purpose of this experiment was to see whether exposing elderly people to subliminal messages that suggested stereotypes about aging could affect their behavior, specifically, how well they walked.
The Harvard