BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And, I'm Bob Garfield. The word "sex" imprinted in Ritz crackers, naked women in ice cubes. The idea of subliminal messaging rests on the notion that words and images lurking in advertising and products themselves can manipulate us, like Manchurian Candidates of consumerism, into desiring certain brands of whiskey or soft drinks or whatever.

The problem is that subliminal ads don't exist and basically never have. The whole concept was born out of a lie, a 50 year old lie, yet lingers, like many an urban myth, in the public's imagination.

Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media ecology at New York University. He joins us now. Mark, welcome back to On the Media.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
Great to be with you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD:
How did the words "subliminal advertising" enter the collective vocabulary?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
In 1957, an enterprising marketing researcher named James Vicary announced to a breathless world that he had conducted an experiment in a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey during screenings of the William Holden picture, Picnic. Vicary claimed that what he had done was to flash subliminal inducements during the screening of the film telling people to drink Coca Cola or to eat popcorn. His claim was that those subliminal flashes had actually increased sales of those items at the concession stand in the theater by some 38 percent.

This announcement took the country by [LAUGHING] storm. People basically freaked out over it. The networks swore they would never engage in practices like this. The New York State Senate passed a law against this kind of thing. Aldous Huxley appeared on The Mike Wallace Show [LAUGHS] and referred to it as something far worse than anything he'd imagined in Brave New World. It was quite a to do.

And the irony is that it turned out that Vicary had made the whole thing up.
BOB GARFIELD:
What was in it for Vicary?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
His hope was that marketers, advertisers would be impressed by his achievement here and hire him to sell their goods by fair means or foul.
BOB GARFIELD:
Hm. On the subject of what motivated Vicary, motivation was at the heart of what was a burgeoning science or pseudo science in advertising in those days, called motivation research. Tell me about it and how America found out about what they called MR.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
Motivation research really was the latest chapter in the rather long history of psychology being used on behalf of advertising. This was not a brand new thing in the '50s. Advertising agencies had hired psychologists for some time. But it wasn't until after World War II that this kind of deep, careful one could argue highly manipulative sort of research became a very standard practice and a really growing industry.

And the reason why this new discipline came to public attention was Vance Packard's book, The Hidden Persuaders, which came out in 1957, a few months before James Vicary made his dramatic announcement, and it became an enormous bestseller. It basically acquainted the American people with the fact that motivation research was ongoing, was costing the advertising industry a great deal of money and that, at least according to Packard, was wildly successful.
BOB GARFIELD:
Now, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of The Hidden Persuaders, you have written the foreword for the reissue. Do you believe that his journalism on this subject was sound?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
He does tend, I think, to exaggerate the effectiveness of MR more than maybe a more careful scholar would do. On the other hand, I think that as a study of a corporate intention, The Hidden Persuaders is really quite valuable.

For example, take a look at the redesign and the, as it were, the remarketing of Marlboro cigarettes, which, as you know, had been a woman's brand for decades. And in 1954, Philip Morris decided to completely reinvent the brand and make it into a man's filter cigarette.

The Marlboro campaign relied on an unprecedented amount of deep motivational research, psychological research, color research, research of all kinds. And this scientific approach turned out to be enormously successful.
BOB GARFIELD:
The single most successful advertising campaign of all time.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
Exactly. The Hidden Persuaders is really a very valuable book because it sheds some light on attempts at manipulation that have since then evolved into something far larger.

For example, he talks in one chapter on what he calls the psycho seduction of children. He talks about trying to get little girls to ask their parents for home permanent sets. He talks about Miss Frances, who was a very popular children's show host at the time, actually telling kids about taking pills.

This stuff really appalled Packard 50 years ago. It's wise, I think, to turn to his book to be reminded that this kind of thing, which we see not only in product marketing but in politics and in various other fields of endeavor, is really, in a sense, fundamentally opposed to democracy.
BOB GARFIELD:
So it really doesn't matter whether they were successful in seducing us subliminally. The fact is they were certainly willing to try, and the result of that five decades later is the various social pathologies, including body image obsession and fast food gorging and God knows what all, perpetrated by Madison Avenue.

But what's interesting about Vance Packard to me is that it didn't just come out of nowhere. It happened at a certain period of time, namely right in the wake of the Korean War, when stories of brainwashing were very much top of mind. Can you talk about that connection?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
It was, you know, an intensely anti Communist era, and people were thinking about mind control and brainwashing and that kind of manipulation as a largely Communist phenomenon, that this is what the Soviets were trying to do. Right around the time that The Hidden Persuaders came out, J. Edgar Hoover's book Masters of Deceit was high on the bestseller lists.

What makes The Hidden Persuaders quite interesting, as you suggest, is that here was a very mainstream journalist making the case, with quite a bit of documentation, that the real brainwashers were right here in the U.S.A. and working within the context of what we call free enterprise.
BOB GARFIELD:
But then came a book in the '70s, which I believe was titled Subliminal Seduction, by Wilson Bryan Key, which took the idea of subliminal advertising about 11 steps farther and made some absolutely preposterous assertions, including, you know, the "sex" imprinted in Ritz crackers one.

It was a huge bestseller and continues, I believe, to, you know, be in the hip pockets of college psychology students even to this day.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
Oh, God forbid. His first book was indeed called Subliminal Seduction, and I think wrote two others after that. He's got one, I think the third one, which is called [LAUGHS] The Clam Plate Orgy, which unfortunately is about just that
BOB GARFIELD:
[LAUGHS]
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
the idea that a photograph of a plate of fried clams is actually a picture of a [LAUGHING] wild orgy. Now, I don't think he was a charlatan. He really believed that these things were crammed into all kinds of pictures around us, and he did lecture extensively on the college circuit.

So it is indeed the case that the urban legend that advertising is suffused with this kind of invisible suasion, that comes from Wilson Key, and there is indeed no basis for this in reality.
BOB GARFIELD:
Well, Mark, thank you very much [WHISPERS] Bob, you're a genius for joining us. [WHISPERS] Bob, you're a genius.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
[LAUGHS] Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:
Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media ecology [WHISPERS] Bob, you're a genius at New York University. His book, Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform, is now out [WHISPERS] Bob, you're a genius in paperback. Mark, anything you want to add?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
You're a genius.
[LAUGHTER]