Freud on Madison Avenue by Samuel Lawrence R.;

Author:Samuel, Lawrence R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Third Communication

With subliminal perception on the ropes, comers from near and far moved in for the knockout. Loyd Ring Coleman, the managing director of J. Walter Thompson in Sydney, Australia, took the time to do the math behind subliminal advertising, pointing out that something smelled rotten in the state of subliminal perception. If the brain could really process two words like “eat popcorn” flashed at one two-hundredth of a second (fifteen times slower than Vicary’s movie theater blinks, giving him a big benefit of the doubt), it could handle four hundred words a second or twenty-four thousand words a minute. Using these figures, someone could read a novel of average length (seventy-two thousand words) in three minutes, something clearly impossible even for a graduate of Evelyn Wood’s speed reading course. Likewise, Coleman figured, at this same rate a semester’s worth of lectures could be recorded, sped up, delivered, and understood in just an hour or so, shaving a heck of a lot of time off a university education. Most amazing of all, these feats could be accomplished while the reader or student watched television or took in a movie, letting the unconscious do the heavy lifting. “The technique of the subliminal stimulus in advertising is manifestly a scientific absurdity,” Coleman concluded, all of us far smarter than the fastest Univac in the world if Vicary’s findings had any validity at all.96

The advertising community was not quite ready to put subliminal perception out to pasture, however. The “unconscious sell” was the number-one issue at the 1958 Advertising Conference held at the University of Michigan in April, not surprisingly, with no fewer than four speakers—two psychologists and two admen—giving talks on the topic. (Man of the hour Vance Packard also was there, urging advertisers to refrain from tapping consumers’ subconscious if other, less invasive tools could be used.) The two admen—a copy director and an art director from Detroit agency Campbell-Ewald—saw subliminal advertising as “a third communication,” which went “over and beyond” their own domains of words and pictures. “We believe it’s there—even though the advertiser may not know it’s there, or may not want it to be there,” the creative team explained, not really able to say what “it” was but nevertheless convinced “it” was powerful stuff.97 This idea was similar to that posed by other subliminalists, that subliminal perception operated outside the five “traditional” senses, that is, was a form of extrasensory perception. Backers of subliminal perception, especially those trying to make a buck off it, also often argued that it was beyond the realm of our current intellectual powers, something that only people in the future would be able to fully understand and appreciate.

The two shrinks, each from the university hosting the conference, were much less taken with subliminal advertising or any other kind of “third communication,” thinking that much more research had to be done before saying subliminal perception was or wasn’t effective. There was another technique, still in its infancy, however, that posed a much bigger

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