| Display title | Subliminal Seduction |
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| Date of page creation | 21:27, 1 November 2013 |
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This attribute controls the content of the description and og:description elements. | All The Tropes is great.
Back in the early days of visual media, a scourge was alleged to be making its way through movie theaters. Researchers claimed to have proof that a visual image, spliced into the film for an undetectable fraction of a second, would nevertheless lodge itself into the viewer's mind. The victims, told for instance 'You're hungry', would then be compelled to go out and buy more popcorn. This quickly expanded in the popular imagination to "compelled to do whatever they tell you to"; no matter how bizarre or expensive the compulsion, viewers wouldn't be able to help themselves.
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In the 1960s and 1970s, as TV sets became more prevalent, this was naturally extrapolated out to TV broadcasts, and assumed to be a routine element of commercials. Teachers on sitcoms would warn their students about the dangers of the practice; of course, the teenagers would then immediately try using it to control their classmates. Hilarity Ensues. Eventually the U.S. Congress actually wrote laws forbidding the practice.
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Similar hooplah arose surrounding "backmasking", the practice of deliberately inserting messages into audio recordings that only make sense when the recording is played backward...an ideal way to hide the real message of the song, it was believed. Throughout the '60s and '70s, rock bands ranging from Led Zeppelin to the Eagles to the Beatles were accused of placing subliminal audio tracks into their music in order to praise Satan, corrupt the innocent, confess the death of a bandmember, whatever. All parents and teachers knew was, it was bad.
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The only problem is, subliminal advertising doesn't really work.
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The initial claims have long since been discredited. Later, better-documented studies have revealed that there is a slight psychological effect, but the results are so minimal that existing preferences will completely overwhelm it. As for backmasking, it has a lot to do with the power of suggestion; the gist of it is that you're more likely to hear stuff like, say, "Here's to my sweet Satan" when you play "Stairway to Heaven" backwards, if you're looking for it. And forget about that having any subliminal effect; if you played an intentionally-hidden message backwards you'd just hear the words clearly, and if you play it forwards the mind can't decipher the gibberish. This shouldn't be surprising, seeing as how most listeners will completely miss the more overt messages of a song.
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Subliminal Seduction combines the worst aspects of a Discredited Trope and a Dead Horse Trope. The concept is to all practical purposes dead, but lives on in the creative imagination. Audiences see subversions and parodies of it so often that they still assume it must be real.
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The trope gets its name from the 1973 book Subliminal Seduction; Ad Media's Manipulation of a Not So Innocent America by Wilson Bryan Key. Key claimed that his research had revealed a massive conspiracy among American advertising agencies to lace both products and photographic images used in ads with subliminal references to sex, and proceeded to show every example he could find. While very popular at the time, his conclusions were controversial and have long been challenged. Key's evidence was at best questionable—he claimed that every Ritz cracker has the word "sex" embedded on it 12 times, to cite one case—and many of his photographic examples can be interpreted as wishful thinking or Pareidolia.
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Subliminal Advertising is what happens when marketers try to use subliminal messages to sell products anyway, either seriously or as a parody.
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