Eat-Popcorn-Drink-Cola Study
The Eat-Popcorn-Drink-Cola Study is a study whose author James Vicary claimed to have discovered a method of unconscious manipulation. It became very well known on September 12, 1957 and was only revealed in 1962 as the invention of an advertising company.
History of the study
On September 12, 1957, various American newspapers reported on the advertising man James Vicary. According to his own account, he had treated thousands of moviegoers with so-called subliminal (subliminal) advertising messages . This was also reported in the advertising-critical book The Secret Seducers , which appeared in the same year.
These messages ("Eat popcorn", "Drink cola") were faded into the movies every five seconds for fractions of a second. Because of their brevity, the messages could not have been consciously perceived by the audience. The author of the study "Eat Popcorn / Drink Cola" now claimed that these advertising messages, which were addressed directly to the subconscious of the cinema-goers, increased sales of cola by 18% and sales of popcorn by around 58%. The publication sparked a storm of indignation: What subliminal messages could this method still convey into people's subconscious? A US Federal Committee and the American Association of Broadcasters then banned this supposed advertising method. Other countries followed suit. The seriousness of the experiment, however, was questioned early in experimental psychology and business administration.
In an interview published in Advertising age in 1962 , the author of the supposed eat-popcorn-drink-cola study himself revealed that it had never existed. The sole purpose of the newspaper duck was to win new customers for a low-turnover marketing company, which also worked with great success.
The eat-popcorn-drink-cola study has now actually been carried out in a modified form and has been repeated several times. For a long time, there were no decisive results showing that optical subliminal advertising directly influences human behavior . More recent studies suggest that subliminal advertising can work if it fits the recipient's current needs , for example advertising a drink to thirsty people.
Technical implementation of subliminal advertising
However, the technical implementation in practice is disputed. Films projected in analog fashion generally consist of 24 individual images per second. A subliminal message can therefore not be shorter than 1/24 of a second when a single image is displayed. However, a single image faded in in this way is not necessarily invisible to the human eye, but can also be consciously perceived with details under certain circumstances. In order to achieve shorter presentation times and thus make it more likely that the messages will be perceived subliminally by some cinema-goers , a tachistoscope would therefore have to be used in addition to the film projector .
Single receipts
- ^ Johan C. Karremans, Wolfgang Stroebe, Jasper Claus: Beyond Vicary's fantasies: The impact of subliminal priming and brand choice . In: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology . tape 42 , no. 6 , October 2006, p. 792-798 , doi : 10.1016 / j.jesp.2005.12.002 .