The Unseen Hand of Subliminal Advertising
Research Paper
Over the years, advertising has evolved from the straightforward promotion of a product or service into a complex and highly competitive skill in which a wide range of techniques have been employed to further develop the effectiveness of the promotion of these products. A number of new marketing techniques and strategies have been devised in a bid to improve the response levels to advertisements, and this has led to the development and expansion of a multibillion dollar advertising industry on its own, where the task of advertising and the development of techniques for this purpose has been handed over to people specialized in this field.
In the mid 30’s a whole new era had dawned on the advertising industry with the introduction of a new, unheard of before technique of promotion. While the existing forms of advertising aimed to consciously persuade people to purchase a product, this new method targeted the subconscious minds of customers. It was as if this method aimed to convince people to buy a product against their own will, because they were compelled to do so beyond their own comprehension and control from within their subconscious minds. Such advertisements made use of a number of clever techniques to achieve the desired effects such as the use of embedded images in the ads to create links from within the minds of the customers’ and their emotions with the products they advertised.
My topic of concern is whether these subliminal messages – and the practice of including subliminally charged messages through which a viewer may be influenced without being aware of it, and against his own will – have a definite effect on viewers or not. My research paper will discuss the advertising industry’s widespread use of subliminal messages and aims to prove that subliminal messages targeted to bring about a change in the viewers’ actions do have the intended effect on consumers, and may be...