James Vicary

James McDonald Vicary (* thirtieth April 1915 in Detroit , † 7. November 1977 ) was an American market researcher , in 1957 with an experiment on the effectiveness of subliminal advertising (English subliminal advertising.) Was known worldwide.

Life

Vicary graduated from the University of Michigan , where he received his Artium Baccalaureatus (AB) degree in 1940 . Even at university he headed the Bureau of Student Opinion .

He then worked for various companies, such as the department store chain JL Hudson , the publishing house Crowell-Collier , the market research company Benson and Benson in Princeton and the advertising agency Benton and Bowles in New York . Finally he founded his own advertising and market research company with the James M. Vicary Company , with which he worked successfully for private and public clients. In addition, from the 1940s onwards, he published in a number of renowned specialist journals, including the Harvard Business Review , the Public Opinion Quarterly, published at Oxford University , and Printer's Ink . He published u. a. on topics such as "word associations" and the use of scientific theories and findings in advertising and market research, for example gestalt theory . He was also a member of numerous professional organizations, including the American Psychological Association , American Sociological Society , American Statistical Association , Society for Applied Anthropology, and the American Marketing Association. In the American Association for Public Opinion Research, he was chairman of the working group on “Progress in Projective Techniques”.

Vicary's experiment

In 1957 Vicary claimed that he had shown in an experiment with cinema-goers that repeated short and therefore unnoticeable insertions of advertising messages could influence the audience. After the message “Eat popcorn, drink cola” was displayed, sales of cola rose by 18% and that of popcorn by around 58%. His eat-popcorn-drink-cola study went around the world and led some states to criminalize the use of subliminal advertising. In Germany, for example, the application is an “administrative offense”. Even the CIA looked into the effectiveness of the method. However, Vicary was unable to provide any documents for the experiment. Repetitions of the experiment in a modified form were carried out as early as the late 1950s and have since been repeated several times without being able to verify the results described by Vicary.

In an interview published in 1962, Vicary finally admitted that the experiment never existed like this. The only purpose was to win new customers for his recently founded, still weak marketing company. However, the dissemination of the alleged results of the study in the media ensured that the topic continues to be spread as a modern myth to this day and that a significant proportion of US citizens still believe in the effectiveness of subliminal advertising.

Further life

The popular belief that the Popcorn-Drink-Cola study was of great benefit to Vicary cannot be substantiated. On the contrary: The fiasco of the falsified study seems to have seriously damaged Vicary professionally. There were rumors that advertising agencies paid Vicary consultancy fees of more than $ 4.5 million immediately after announcing his alleged experiment. But his company, the Subliminal Projection Company , founded especially to market this idea, went bankrupt in June 1958. And from the end of the 1950s there are no longer any publications by Vicary in specialist journals.

Vicary's estate is held in the archives of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut . Vicary's date of death is not recorded there. However, the records end in 1967.

Web links

• James A. Vicary Papers , University of Connecticut Libraries
• Reto U. Schneider : "Eat popcorn!" In: NZZ Folio 11/01

Individual evidence

1. ↑ see also the following: Directory of the James A. Vicary Papers in the Archives & Special Collections of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center , University of Connecticut Libraries
2. ↑ James M. Vicary: Word Association and Opinion Research: "Advertising" -An Illustrative Example . In: Public Opinion Quarterly. Vol. 12, No. 1, 1948, pp. 81-98; James M. Vicary: How Psychiatric Methods Can Be Applied to Market Research . In: Printer's Ink. Volume 11, April, 1950, pp. 30-38, May, pp. 39-48, see Eva S. Moskowitz: In Therapy We Trust: America's Obsession with Self-Fulfillment . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2001, pp. 159f.
3. ↑ James M. Vicary: Gestalt Theory and Paired Comparisons . In: Public Opinion Quarterly. Volume 14, No. 1, 1950, pp. 139-141; see: Graham R. Walden: Polling and Survey Research Methods, 1935–1979: An Annotated Bibliography . Greenwood Press, Westport 1996, p. 136
4. ↑ see Proceedings of the American Association for Public Opinion Research at the Eighth Annual Conference on Public Opinion Research, Pocono Manor, Penn. In: The Public Opinion Quarterly. Volume 17, No. 4, 1953/54, pp. 521-564
5. ↑ Application and interpretation rules of the state media authorities for the implementation of administrative offense proceedings according to the Interstate Broadcasting Treaty (OWiRL) (revised version of January 2001), 6.9 § 49 Paragraph 1 Sentence 1 No. 15 RStV
6. ↑ Richard Gafford: The Operational Potential of Subliminal Perception . In: Studies in Intelligence. Volume 2, No. 2, 1958, pp. 65–69 ( pdf ( memento of the original from January 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to instructions and then remove this notice. ) 
7. ↑ see Anthony R. Pratkanis: The cargo-cult science of subliminal persuasion . ( Memento of the original from December 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Skeptical Inquirer. Volume 16, 1992, pp. 260-272; German subliminal advertising. In: Gero von Randow (ed.): My paranormal bike and other reasons for skepticism, discovered in the “Skeptical Inquirer”. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, pp. 47-61 
8. ↑ see Fred Danzig: Subliminal Advertising - Today It's Just Historic Flashback for Researcher Vicary . In: Advertising Age. Volume 17, September, 1962, pp. 72f.
9. ↑ see Sheri J. Broyles: Subliminal advertising and the perpetual popularity of playing to people's paranoia. ( Memento of the original from May 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Journal of Consumer Affairs. Volume 40, No. 2, 2006, pp. 392-406, Table 1 
10. ↑ Reto U. Schneider (2001)