Caffeinated posts from a copywriter/adgrunt. I write about advertising, design, astronomy, cooking, and pretty much anything else that strikes my fancy, including random bits of reference info for work purposes. You may also know me as 'that other gal' who helps run Adland. | make contact | RSS Feed | ATOM

Tuesday, November 30, 2004
[ :: adgruntie :: Give me a break ]

+ During my search on google news for interesting ad news, I came across this study on environment and the objects in that environment effecting busniess attitudes that was done at Stanford. Now it all sounded somewhat interesting and really rather logical until I got to this paragraph.

"These are pretty big effects with pretty minor manipulations," he says. The fact that participants were unaware that their behavior had been influenced even when this fact was pointed out to them in the debriefing after the experiment is also significant. "We're simply not conscious of how many of the things all around us affect our behavior," he notes. This can be true, he says, even if we are not simply receiving the messages through subliminal tricks such as rapid image flashing in advertising, which is designed to circumvent our conscious awareness -- but when we are seeing the objects right in front of us, as the participants in the study demonstrated.

Excuse me, but I thought this old debate of subliminal advertising died a while back. In my 6 years in the industry, I have never ever seen these sorts of thigns worked into any advertisement. No one even uses the words subliminal in the editing booths, or talks about how we'll work in subliminal anything. It's all a bunch of bullshit. And i find it rather distrubing that it's coming out of a school like Stanford that is supposed to have a good reputation.