Transcript for:
Understanding Subliminal Messaging in Advertising

[Music] my [Music] do [Music] okay [Applause] and people it's really hard [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] subliminal a subliminal message selenal messages power of mind hey have you heard about the crazy new way to send the message today it flashed on a screen too quick to see but still you get it subliminally ladies and gentlemen the 59 chevy see it isn't it beautiful you used a subliminal cut now quite a few subliminal cuts from some photos i made okay class today we are going to talk about subliminal advertising what's that scully are you familiar with subliminal messages you mean like sex and ice cubes of liquor ads why would anyone want this [ __ ] job because it affords them other interesting opportunities like splicing single frames of pornography in the family film and niage they keep saying that let me play this backwards [Music] they're recruiting people with subliminal messages well what do you expect those bastards turned a whole generation of americans into smokers with their damn subliminal advertising subliminal it's a subliminal message broad wave to trigger i've been seeing this code pop up all over the last few weeks it's alliance and it's high military [Music] subliminal advertising complete [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] if you look at something smell something hear something it's going into your brain at the speed of light almost and all being retained now what comes out in terms of cognitive or conscious perception is very limited bits and pieces of this one of the earliest acknowledgments of the unconscious process appears in some of aristotle's writing which goes back a good bit sigmund freud was the first person to coherently probe the existence of the unconscious and postulate that people have a lot of emotions and drives that they're not aware of freud's theories were at at the time very uh controversial as he was telling people with a sense of things they didn't really want to know about freud used a number of techniques to determine what their unconscious conflicts were and one of those that he was very involved with was interpreting their dreams he felt that when people were sleeping the barrier between the unconscious and the conscious relaxed and the people actually experienced in the dream state their true unconscious motivations freud wrote an interesting book on the uses of these things socially and he warned these are dangerous toys to play with because we don't understand them we're not likely to understand them and they're capable of tricking off a pathological response you know it really started in america with ed bernays who imported and used some of freud's you know psychoanalytic theories to give people in their consumer choices substitutes for sort of primal urges in his book propaganda he said it was the duty of marketing people to lead an otherwise unleadable irrational uh free people to making a consensus or a decision that was a responsible decision and so we've had we had a marketing philosophy that was inherently about manipulating and motivating a public in times like these most men become highly suggestible they listen eagerly for any voice which sounds authoritative they listen eagerly for anyone who can tell them what is wrong and what to do to write it and the best way to sell is to find an access to the subconscious so you're not just presenting a product or a picture or a celebrity in film you're you're making that accessible to the unconscious processes of millions of people most of america learned about the concept of subliminal advertising in 1957. uh there was a marketing researcher by the name of james vickery and he announced that he had done these this very elaborate experiment supposedly he claimed that he had conducted a secret experiment in new jersey cinema in which he had flashed the words hungry eat popcorn and drink coca-cola over the movie picnic starring kim novak and they weren't even single frame adds they were much faster than that because he was using something called a takista scope the high speed the kisses go this is a projector that flashes uh about 150th of a second though you can change that speed and he reported that that the coca-cola consumption went way up the popcorn consumption went way up enormously successful like if you're watching a film and all of a sudden something will quickly flash that you can't actually see and it puts it in your mind that you maybe want to coke in the 50s you know like when movies started starting out they used to put yours to go to movies just put the little uh popcorn thing right subliminally there i've heard that they do that in like movies like by coke it's like flash on the screen when it's right before the movie starts so i could see how you do you think they're doing that in movie theaters i don't know i get really thirsty a lot of companies were interested a number of tv stations agreed to run subliminal ads many competitors came into the field with other products and television and radio stations openly admitted that they were experimenting with it radio stations were going to run whispered ads where they'd whisper things like buy oklahoma oil or drink 7up very softly beneath the records that the disc jockeys were playing and it caused an outrage the public got very nervous and very excited about it there were all sorts of editorials against this congress decided that they would have to hold hearings on this vicary went to washington to demonstrate this process and and this led to statements like those by norman cousins that condemn subliminal as the most dangerous technology to have ever been developed by man [Music] the networks rather quickly decided that it was in their interest to prevent congress from acting so they formed this national association of broadcasters and they all agreed that they would not allow subliminal advertising they took the position that it didn't work they tried to calm those public's anxieties by insisting that it wasn't effective vickery dropped out of the the consulting business and kind of retired and as he later admitted this was all basically a scam the experiment that he said he'd done he hadn't really done they increase the consumption of coca-cola and popcorn enormously and there's a little grain of truth to it i mean there have been other experiments arguably there might be a moderate increase as a result of commands like drink coca-cola it couldn't it couldn't possibly amount to this statistics that he had uh suggested but once you let the you know the genie out of the bottle it's very hard to put it back in so we've had this this almost a mythos of subliminal advertising ever since then the motivational researchers in the 50s developed a variety of electronic equipment that they could measure people's unconscious reactions to like one of these was a galvanic skin response where they would measure minute fluctuations in the amount of sweat on your skin which was related to your state of anxiety are also a heartbeat or they had special cameras in supermarkets that would measure the dilation of the pupils that would indicate how interested a person was in front [Music] the advent of new technology posit position emission tomography enhanced magnetic resonance imaging etc and we're seeing a whole lot of new research come out shows us what areas of the brain are excited by subliminal stimulation kilbourne and associates uh in the mid-80s did a fascinating experiment when they took two actual advertisements that they believe contained subliminal impacts that they had found on their own one of them was a marlboro lad which sewed you know guys on a horse back driving through the range with big rocks around them and one of the rocks allegedly had been made to look like an erect phallus and they hired an artist and they adulterated the picture and took the phallus out so they would have a control and then they showed it to people and measured their galvanic skin responses and found out that the picture with the phallus had a greater effect than the picture without the phallus [Applause] [Music] do we were the first to demonstrate that you could detect responses from scalp electrodes where we had a group of words that were clearly negative and words that were clearly positive and the words are sort of mixed up together and they're presented at a thousandth of a second so i wanted that to be no nonsense you know no question about whether people were aware one thousandth of a second you ain't seen nothing and the basic finding was that the negative words when they were presented subliminally would have a bigger voltage of brain response than did the positive words again this goes back to the whole general scientific question can a subliminal stimulus in and of itself cause a person's behavior to change and to change in some significant way about something important and the evidence there is problematic there are some studies that say yes others that say no [Music] [Music] for one thing they were the biggest group in the world they had carte blanche at the emi studios at abbey road and therefore they could pretty much do whatever they wanted they were also unbelievably curious in the summer of 1969 a bunch of college radio stations started this rumor that paul mccartney had died and that for some strange reason the beatles were keeping this secret but it got a lot of people listening listening very carefully to these later beatles albums and that's where john lennon had done all this experimentation they had an opportunity to do things with music that even their peers frankly couldn't do because they didn't have the time and the money in the cachet and the beatles also were experimenting with drugs at the heart of this was was really a thing they found at the end of strawberry fields [Music] [Music] yes that's that is manipulation that is doctoring but it's in the pursuit of art it's in the pursuit of expression lenin later told rolling stone magazine that what he actually said there was cranberry sauce so i in the recording studio i had them play this with various filters to make the more legible and it really does sound like cranberry sauce there's a very big difference between say reverse messages and the artistic potential in manipulating sound on the track revolution nine number nine the track's title is repeated many times within the song and if you reverse revolution nine it actually sounds like [Music] in order to write a lyric that will say one thing forwards and something else backwards what kind of writer do you have to be that's a genius beyond my comprehension i can't imagine that anyone's that smart you have to draw a distinction between what i call these engineered reversed messages and the ones that are purely coincidental for instance it's been found that if you say the words jesus loves you record that and play it backwards it sounds like we smell sausages [Music] what it proves is that our minds have this great pattern finding ability and we can really make sense even where there's nonsense there i would think that the revolution 9 thing is purely coincidental [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] what we try to do with our music is to paint a picture an audio picture to best get across the message we're trying to convey with the lyrics and we use whatever means we can to do that the first album i remember hearing anything like that on was the beatles sgt pepper that was filled with all kinds of interesting sound collages and spoken word pieces and specialty sounds you know some people talk about all the dangers of subliminal messages [Music] they talk about that in music and i think that topic itself is subjective what is subliminal it all depends on who's listening you know i hear things very clearly in records you know that are there because that's my gig that's what i do you know i listen to things very carefully other people might think something's subliminal because they've never heard it before well they're just not focused on it so i think it's all kind of debatable we'd like to forewarn you to brace yourself because what you are about to see is hardcore truth that much of the mainstream media would like to keep hidden from your eyes [Music] people would be blown away if they realized the subversion that takes place in in popular media and that the agendas that lying back of much of that subversion here we see robert plant while singing stairway to heaven telling his fans that sometimes words have two meanings as he signs with his hands that they are both forward and backwards cause you know sometimes words [Music] but basically backwards and over 25 words backwards straight it says here's my sweet satan i want to look backwards like the zep whose power is satan and he will give you give you 666. [Music] i was sitting in a room when i was producing cinderella in about 1987 this child who was on methadram started questing me on this backward masking it's crap this satanic phenomena goes far beyond the scope of human ingenuity and is demonically inspired bob garcia of a m record stated quote it must be the devil because nobody here knows how to do it well there's no point to that anyway and you can make anything up you want if you wish so i believe personally deep down they know what's going on and they were seducing their fans and hey you know the whole power trip backwards masking is rubbish it never happened we never did it that's just the fact i was there there's so much evidence out there but it's under the surface at first and and i think when people begin to see it uh hopefully they care enough about truth more so than experience [Music] it's just this spring clean for the make yes there are too fast [Music] [Music] if you listen there there yeah i heard them all that's crazy but it was definitely put there on purpose and maybe just for certain people to hear it [Music] [Music] i could definitely hear the words in there how did someone even find that out i was like a conspiracy theory in my opinion that's like oh there's hidden messages in this [Music] [Music] the only thing i really heard was music it kind of sounded like it was um in a different language uh it was kind of scary i mean it sounded like it was saying something but in a different language [Music] you know if you want to hear satan talking to you while stairway to heaven plays backwards then that's exactly what you'll hear you'll find a way to hear it first time in devo that anybody ever said anything to us about subliminal messages we'd made this short film and it was long before mtv it's called in the beginning was the end the truth about de-evolution and um somebody came up to us after we showed the film once this woman and she was really mad she looked i know what you you're doing i know what you're up to and you're like what what'd you say she goes i know what you're doing i saw it i saw on the screen i saw the word submit and the word obey we're like wow where'd those how'd those get in there and so we were we were like yeah right and after that you know we were thinking oh we got to put subliminal messages in our stuff now to me backward masking you know in the beatles and paul is dead or any of that kind of stuff to me that was just all the fun stuff that if you were a fan you looked for that kind of stuff and you wanted to find it the idea of it being dark or malevolent you know i think is just kind of paranoid thought on the part of people that already don't like the music i don't i i never really saw anything of harm coming from from backward masking [Music] double shooting okay whereabouts was the shooting right in my backyard is anybody hurt i and what observers call a first of its kind trial attorneys today told a nevada court that two troubled young men who shot themselves in 1985 were influenced by subliminal messages in a rock and roll album the members of the british rock group judas priest listened in a nevada courtroom today as one of their recordings was described as a killer they heard you have to die to be a hero and they had played over and over and over again this stained glass album particularly a song better by you better than me now what had happened is the two at a point had looked at one another and they had chanted do it repeatedly do it do it do it had taken their father's shotgun had left gone to the schoolyard prop shotgun underneath belknap's chin pulled the trigger [Music] killed himself vance hesitated he didn't brace it it blew the front of his face up i would like to call certain people [Music] murderers i feel that they murdered ray [Music] are there subliminal do-its on the better by you better than me song absolutely not i heard the word do it the words do it but i didn't understand in what context or why it was there i identified approximately seven of them it's very difficult because it is a subliminal level [Music] the group judas priest admitted that they had used subliminal messages on other recordings just not this one it is the claim of subliminal messages that propelled this case to trial similar lawsuits claiming rock music caused damage have been thrown out of court because lyrics are protected as free expression under the first amendment but the judge in this case says subliminal messages are not protected as free speech what is really on trial here is the whole concept of subliminal persuasion the courtroom is no place for referees about the unknown capacities of the human mind we took the judge into the control room and played all of the 24 tracks that were mixed to make this record and showed the judge how you know you put it was actually at the end of a vocal and so there was an exhalation of breath combined with a guitar sound too and then if you if you if you listen to that with the thought in mind the suggestive thought in mind that it says do it you can hear do it so yes it it was there and that's what made me so uh puzzled when the judge concluded that if it was there was there accidentally that made no sense to me at all the cbs never produced the original master the original 24 track master would have been required in order for us to determine whether it had been intentionally placed there or it was indeed a coincidence of sin and so i argued that it was the straw that broke the camel's back and the judge decided look they had all kinds of reasons to harm themselves and to make a case for that alone it didn't hold water prosecution of alleged us and tried to paint this picture of drug crazed satan worshippers and nothing could be further than the truth it's absolutely ridiculous and bizarre and people just don't appreciate that you know we're humans with feelings like everybody else and we don't all sing about love we would get powerful from our emotions and just soar with the music and then they go after them and i could dance and it was like a drug like americana did you understand what he said he said looking back now the music would almost drive you crazy you're crazy well yeah i did i wanted to climb the walls i couldn't stand it and his behavior would just change and you can't always blame it on the parents you can't always blame it on the music industry can't always blame it on movies and television but all these things we have to acknowledge have in our influential factors on children and their decisions so all of these things should be looked at and considered [Music] hitchcock was really intrigued by this whole idea of subliminal effects in movies in fact the first time he used it was in a film called spellbound which was a black and white movie but it had one frame that was in color and it occurs when a character is actually turning a gun on himself to commit suicide and then when he pulls the trigger there's a single frame of red what he had to do was to pay an artist to basically hand tint that one frame in every print of spellbound so he obviously took this pretty seriously [Music] oh i saw him in the editing room where he would cut right down to the frame certain just frame by frame where he'd want his cuts so he was he took a great deal of time with the editor and what he wanted when he came to do psycho he did something even more elaborate towards the end of the film there's a very slow dissolve to a shot of the police pulling janet lee's car out of the swamp well during that dissolve hitchcock's superimposes this kind of skull-like face on tony perkins face so it creates a rather ghoulish effect and obviously hitchcock thought that this increased the emotional punch of this particular part of the movie [Applause] [Music] audiences are very gullible i just feel that you can lead an audience like hitchcock would do and i think you could do it with subliminal uh it would be very effective if murder and knife and that sort of thing was intentionally put in it was done i wasn't around it was done when he worked with the the rider walter merchant and richard bags with some of the electronics and apocalypse now they were always mixing real sounds underneath sounds that weren't associated with the object to make you feel a certain way or anything that would heighten a certain fear during the warfare on top of that desire to be very very accurate was this desire to go very deep psychologically i mean there were any number of tricks or things that happened that the soundtrack of that movie during the helicopter attack on the village a wooden trestle bridge is destroyed and so these wooden timbers are the explosions also mixed in with that where the sound of bowling pins being struck for the bowling ball things like that were used extensively and in a lot of other movies as well like i know like in the godfathers you want to make fear something's going to happen they mixed a baby cry you know and stuff like that [Music] baby crying it's very very important to pay attention to because otherwise there's no future that's why babies cries are so irritating you can't you renounce satan [Music] to me that's creative um and that's tapping into this part of the brain if you want something out in front of people you don't hit them over the head with it but you have it there so the audience maybe doesn't realize that but it's imprinted in their mind that it's why did i see that friedkin was another director who was rather intrigued by this idea and in his film the exorcist he actually uses subliminal shots in at least two very key parts of the film one of them is in a dream sequence and the other is during the actual exorcism [Applause] uh what you see are very brief two frame shots of this kind of cadaverous face and so like my brothers and i would always freeze frame on that one frame and it's terrifying you don't even want to look at it so it does something to it you know so the question is why are you doing that in my mind exorcist was a groundbreaking film it had never been done before so he was really experimenting with the cause of being totally afraid and fear [Music] [Music] [Music] last june delegates to the southern baptist convention's annual meeting voted to boycott walt disney they are pushing a christian bashing family bashing pro-homosexual agenda there was the suggestion that a clergyman became sexually aroused while he was performing a marriage ceremony the allegedly offending bulge goes by in less than a second but if you were to slow down a few frames of this scene you might think the preacher was indeed more than happy to see ariel there right there right there right there what is it uh it is clearly his knee everybody knows it's his knee [Music] we ask for a transformation of disney or disney will go down [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] it's just people spending too much time looking for things that aren't there [Music] [Music] that's how we can sell sex to little girls see if we make the posters with little girls reaching for your junk then you have to wear purity rings or else disney company looks bad we thank you so much for this beautiful harvest of dominoes kfc and the always delicious taco bell you can see that the movie star is holding the pepsi right there but you're not thinking of it as a commercial you're thinking of it as a movie converse all stars vintage 2004 don't turn your face up like that i know you want something all you gotta do is ask even product placement is normally a subliminal thing because you really don't think hey that guy's drinking a coke but you do see it and it does register in your brain [Music] [Music] i think that's the best way to do it than hitting him over the head with a product right in their face [Music] so in some sense i think you could say even product placements are probably the most successful form of supplemental advertising i want the perfect food [Music] imagine all those burgers in your stomach right now [Music] uh the average tv viewer sees about 30 000 commercials per year that's 30 000 repetitions of a single message the single message is buy this do this it's going to make you feel better you're going to like it if you're not doing it you're probably not very hip this is going to solve a problem for you systemically advertising works better on people who are lonely and afraid it's a kind of a form of reverse therapy you know you go to a therapist because he wants to resolve your unconscious conflicts and make you feel better about yourself but media has exactly the opposite orientation you need to create tension in the viewer conscious tension and anxiety so that they look to a product for relief if people are happy they're not going to buy stuff they don't need there's been memos that have been circulated you know where insider advertising executives have said it's our job to make women feel bad about themselves we really believe that this is the way a woman should look this this version of some guy's marketing plan that he's set up oh look at that pretty ad you know i like the boobs i'm looking at what i love now they don't realize that they're being engineered we can look at things like anorexia and bulimia and as far as i'm concerned you can look at that and say this is a media driven event our families are being destroyed i mean we've never in the history of humanity being under an assault because we've never had mass media like we do today right is the purpose of the television ad to make you an informed consumer making a rational choice purpose of the ad is to delude and deceive you with imagery it'll be uninformed you'll make an irrational choice that's what business spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on and the last thing they want is markets what they want is coercion and control you know when goebbels developed the powerful propaganda system in nazi germany they were explicitly borrowing very explicit from u.s commercial propaganda commercial advertising to copy these techniques you know simple slogans repeated over and over again appealing to the emotions i mean all those ideas which had been worked into correctly a science if we don't have any kind of critical analysis some kind of overreaching way in order to analyze and understand what's being fed to us how uh people can be manipulated people enjoy the manipulation advertising is fun reality is boring you take the blue pill the story ends all i'm offering is the truth let's see um tv pretty much advertisers are looking to get the attention of younger and younger children and any advertising directed to a young child should be considered subliminal because young children don't know the difference between the ad and the program it all blends seamlessly together any advertising to four-year-olds or five-year-olds or six-year-olds is dealing with a consciousness which is not using rational processes people use the television as a babysitter right they plop their kid down in front of a tv and uh there's no guidance there's no instruction there's no parent sitting there watching tv with the kid they start targeting children at nine months old they've noted that by two years old they can achieve brand loyalty and recognition this is extraordinary when you see something on tv that you want what do you do ask my mom for it and what if she says now i just keep asking and annoying her for it you know every psychology student discusses of course the four fundamental drives the four f's there is fight flight feeding you never forget the four refs when they're explained to you that way our society largely driven in part by advertisers motivating us to consume we end up with the fifth drive it's more more [Music] we systematically desensitize their threshold of arousal by increasing the amount of stimuli that we deliver that is sexual or violent or gross in nature and so the more begins with i want more stimulation and then it continues through everything else whether it's more food more alcohol and drugs more cars more money more power more women more more more more i mean why why are people maxed out on their credit cards buying things that you know who knows if they need them i mean consumerism becomes a secular religion where we use uh certain material goods to fill holes in our souls any one of us is can be trapped by this i mean i would ask anyone to look around their house and how many things that any of us have bought over the course of the last 10 years we don't use simply knowing what's going on is not going to protect you from the effect you can know perfectly well that they put this gorgeous model in an ad to get you all excited about coors beer the fact is it's still going to work we're all consuming and acting and behaving precisely the way that they want us to it's what the church does it's what monarchs did it's what advertisers do and you know and and the game continues some are wondering if perhaps there was a subliminal ad a flash of a commercial product seen on the show [Music] [Music] if you look at something smell something here's something that's going to be right at the speed of light almost and all being retained he claimed that he had conducted a secret experiment in which he had flashed the words hungry eat popcorn and drink coca-cola and it puts it in your mind that you maybe want to cope the public got very nervous and very excited about it [Music] i buried paul that kind of whatever are there subliminal do-its on the song absolutely not [Music] why are people maxed out on their credit cards they're buying things that who knows if they need them or not some are wondering if perhaps there was a subliminal ad a flash of a commercial product seen on the show [Music] [Applause] in the research that was conducted by the roper organization they found that 57 percent of americans believe that subliminal advertising happens i think there's so much in the air there's so much a sense of sort of distrust in government in you know powerful leadership that i wouldn't be surprised to find that more people now believe that subliminal advertising is practiced than have in previous decades i'm sure it does can't say i've ever picked up all of myself there's got to be something but i haven't like really noticed that not as much i don't think i don't think nowadays i think it's pretty straightforward well you know i think there's certain advertising companies you know that uh uh for whatever trying to market an item you know just they'll throw something in and then you don't even think about it definitely definitely yeah when i watch television for a couple hours suddenly i'm very hungry and i do realize that it's from the advertising or the subliminal messages you mean like the uh camel cigarettes there you go the the image in the camel i mean i'm sure that exists absolutely i'm sure it exists i don't really know much about the technology but i'm sure it does i know it's supposed to be illegal but i know it exists though yeah you heard it was illegal yeah okay my my best example of subliminal messaging would be like when you watch a movie and all of a sudden you see everybody's drinking pepsi i i don't know i don't know i think that the colors are subliminal like no one really realizes that most things are a certain color for a reason well i do believe that advertising agencies use subliminals in their advertising to be effective a subliminal message has to either stimulate an unconscious anxiety or satisfy an unconscious fantasy you discover very quickly that the human brain is extremely sensitized to things that deal with the beginning of life reproduction uh sex as we vulgarize it at the end of life death now if you can plant something in there that's strongly motivating sex and death the unconscious will remember that for a long time we don't know for how long most people can see what they want to see in almost anything and there's an author who's a i mean it's a sad and paranoid guy who sees sexual imagery and ice cubes and everywhere he looks is there any way you could call that something else i mean it's not a telescope it's not a leaning tower of pizza it's a penis the problem is we hide this stuff from ourselves we don't want to deal with it and once you come to terms with this it turns the whole world upside down if the medieval artist can do it why not chicken mcnuggets the sc x's are all over the crack makes them taste better i love ritz crackers the fact that he made some allegations that are not credible doesn't mean that the substance of what he had is said wasn't you know logical and totally persuasive this ad appeared on the back cover a playboy of time the man was used for about three years how could this stuff ever sell johnny walker scotch they didn't put any scotch in the glass glasses now if you look at the ice cube that's on the table the right side of that ice cube you see an interesting looking face your grotesque almost surrealistic uh mask it's not an interesting figure to put into that it's a monster with encircling arms and a skull-like face it's the death symbol there are a dozen of them in these six ice cubes the predominant trend in modern subliminal advertising is seems to be sexual assault or sexual violence and this is an example of that if you look at her facial expression it could be that she's finding it extremely unpleasant and the person on the left seems to be violently ripping her necklace from her throat well it reinforces the idea that women are victims and that it's sexy for a woman to be a victim and that's very powerful and very important to maintain status quo in our culture and that's how you can convince men also that she deserves to be violated she she wants to be hurt she's you know look at her this benson and henderson first appeared on the back cover of time magazine and also in wii magazine on a conscious level the ad is promising sexual excitement but at an unconscious level it's stimulating sexual anxiety and the reason is that the ladies backbone has been carefully airbrushed to resemble an erect male phallus anxiety is associated with the construction of cigarettes we all know that people smoke more when they're nervous it's totally logical to think that making them nervous induces them to smoke more to really intend to make people anxious and you don't know how that person deals with anxiety the only thing you're wanting is that he light up a cigarette but you don't know what else it might do okay that to me is outrageous if you're you're very sensitive to the idea of fallacies you're going to have a much harder time seeing the fallacy than the advancement in henderson than if you're not and if you're more sensitive to it it's more likely to have a greater effect on you unconsciously so in that respect that they are tapping into something that i think is strong potentially and therefore is very worrisome it isn't that the the cues the stimulants are invisible to the naked eye it's just that we don't recognize them for what they are so the most notorious example of this would be the newport cigarette ads which simply show happy couples frolicking in the green but you realize after you look closely that these are really sort of sado masochistic dramas that either the man or the woman is is in fatal control of the situation so that would strike me as a good example of a subliminal pitch it's all right there on the surface we just don't know that the surface is in fact exactly what it is for me the bottom line as i was saying before you don't mess with the unconscious because you don't know you don't know what the effects might be 70s [Music] why waste your time wondering what's wrong wondering what's right in front of your eyes or what makes you sick don't waste your time wondering what makes me tick [Music] invisible [Music] why waste your time questioning you know it but you can't be certain [Music] it's not like [Music] i've worked inside at agencies i've worked side by side with evil people to see did anybody anywhere do any of this and no [Music] [Applause] i remember the first commercial i ever did was a hawaiian punch commercial i remember putting the the message sugar is bad for you just you know set it in low volume in the background and everybody in the room is tapping their pencils and they're all you know they're just all these execs and and the creative people are going yeah that's hawaiian punch yeah and they're just like singing the song and they're just like and we're looking at each other and we're like nobody heard it yet and it was like sugar is bad for you went down on the commercial and it went out nationally and we found a whole list of things that we were able to easily put in a commercial and never once got stopped they must work because we said something i remember doing a levi commercial and saying something like this is the uniform of the wad and i don't know people are they're all wearing blue jeans now so it must have worked it must have helped levi's out i guess i'm sure that if i can put you know subliminal messages in in a commercial that advertising agencies must have a much easier time of it and probably can do it in much bigger ways [Music] and we were wondering if someone from amalgamated would be interested in uh meeting with us can you tell me who you're transferring me to good afternoon sediment advertisers just can't admit it i mean of course they can't admit they're not going to say they embed you know phalluses and cigarette ads i used to work in advertising for many years as a research director and all i ever got in response to my questions were obscenities contrary to what many people think subliminal advertising is not really illegal so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] what happened in 1984 is really the culmination of a long story you know orwell's book 1984 some have said predisposed congress to investigate orwellian techniques and of course subliminal is often thought of as an orwellian technique there had been complaints and congress investigates complaints from their constituents the house subcommittee on science and technology wants to find out if the technology is being abused kansas democrat dan glickman is chairman i myself think to think that subliminal communication clearly has a twilight zone implication to it i think it's incumbent upon us in congress to at least explore the issue to see how widespread it is the veritable who's who of the advertising world appeared and they argued subliminal does not work we don't use it and we don't use it because it doesn't work university of michigan's dr howard chevron called for a moratorium on the technique until further study is completed although this may sound like science fiction we may be on the threshold of invading the individual's perhaps last stronghold of personal privacy his own inner thoughts my estimation is that they certainly got sufficient evidence that something along those lines was happening the conclusion in their report was that it was unlikely to be having the effects that were claimed the law in congress did not pass the laws didn't pass anywhere in any state because of what i believe was a deliberate disinformation campaign designed to make the public feel comfortable we don't use it and if we did it wouldn't work in front of you is a manual this manual was sent to me and is a training manual of one of the largest advertising agencies on the planet and this training manual very s in a very sophisticated way lays out several ad campaigns that have actually run major products how they embedded both taboo imagery devils and whatnot and sexual imagery so not used i know that is just flagrantly false there was a memo which i have a copy of at home from the national association of advertising agencies that went out to every advertising agency in the country advising him what to do if i come to town they say keep the hell away from the sky a crazy person writes a book about a a fraudulent joke experiment and ends up creating such a stir that an organization has created the american association of advertising agencies to dispel the myth [Music] [Music] um [Music] fact that you won't meet with me [Music] okay [Music] [Music] he's talking about people from cradle to grave being exposed to subliminal messages it must be that some people some borderline personalities are pushed over the edge and led to commit horrible crimes because of the influence of advertising there is loose in their towns people like me today whose dangerous impulses are being fueled day in and day out by violence in the media in its various forms particularly sexualized if advertisers and corporations could be massaging our subconscious with these tactics in what way might our own government be programming us in the 2000 presidential campaign uh george bush ran an attack against al gore the bush prescription plan seniors choose and at the end of the ad it said bureaucrats decide and for a brief second for about a thirtieth of a second the letters r-a-t-s got very large when this came out it was a very big deal for at least one and a half news cycles some people in the advertising industry say they believe the inclusion of the word rats was intentional even if it was not designed to send a subliminal or subconscious message now that is not an accident will robinson is a democratic media consultant not associated with the gore campaign he finds it implausible that no one noticed the word rats when the ad was in production someone made a decision to put that word up on screen and make it part of the spot and they worked hard to make sure it was that way bush campaign of course has denied this they say that it was an accident just ask the man who made the so-called rats ad republican consultant alex castellanos let me see if i can say this more clearly for you i didn't know it was there it's a ridiculous thing there is no secret rat strategy to win an election that i'm aware of you had both gore and lieberman decrying this use of subliminal advertising i find it a very disappointing development i've never seen anything quite like it george bush was forced to do his best to disassociate himself from this entire thing which he actually did very effectively you know the idea of putting subliminal messages in the ads i don't think we need to be subliminal about the differences between our views subliminal messages you talk about some clinical so if the guy can't pronounce it he couldn't have been behind it i guess the ad has run 4 400 times in 16 states including big battlegrounds like florida michigan ohio and pennsylvania [Music] recount that's occurring in florida is an automatic recount based on state law it was not requested by the gore campaign [Music] and tonight for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy i offer my concession hi george walker bush do solemnly swap [Music] this week on science sunset remember subliminal advertising now cognitive scientists at hebrew university in jerusalem have shown that some thoughts and behaviors can be affected subconsciously and subliminally by commonly used symbols they asked israeli volunteers to complete a computer-based survey about their opinions on core issues in the israeli-palestinian conflict but for half of the volunteers subliminal images of the israeli flag were flashed throughout the question and answer session the flashes were milliseconds faster than we can do here you might expect that exposure to such a strong nationalistic image would polarize people to one political extreme or the other but in this case the subliminal image of the flag pulled people from both ends of the political spectrum toward the middle compared to the control group and phone calls to these people after the elections confirmed that most of them followed through when they actually voted this research is important because it shows that subliminal messages can affect your attitude and behavior for science central news i'm your science sensing i'm science sensei and i approve this message [Music] [Music] a video news release or a vnr is created by a public relations agency usually in order to communicate a specific message on the behalf of a client whether it's a politician or corporation or government office [Music] the use of video news releases has to be challenged at every level in this country vnr's as they're known government puts them out corporations put them out they'll have a fake reporter who's actually a public relations professional and this story goes out to newsrooms around the country so there are people watching a program that they think is news but the actual news reports aren't news reports at all but are paid advertisements that look like news reports this is someone pushing a product but it's presented as a fair and balanced report which it of course isn't while i don't know if i would call that subliminal i do think that it fits into this entire environment of so much of our media operating on a below the radar below the threshold of consciousness there are hundreds of channels can they all be doing this what matters though is not the channels it's who owns those channels and that issue of media consolidation is critical the rise in the use of video news releases has a great deal to do with the conglomeration of the mass media because as more and more tv stations around the country come to be owned by the you know fewer and fewer players there's more and more cost cutting that goes on in the newsrooms of these stations you know when you look at a media environment where only five or six companies control the vast majority of the world's media and they work in collaboration with each other and they share members of boards of directors and things of that nature like in the same way that i say we have to broaden our concept of subliminal i think we also have to broaden our concept of what a conspiracy is they're using our airwaves and they have a responsibility to bring out the full diversity of opinion and to get to the truth not to bring you news stories that are disguised as their own when they're simply government or corporate propaganda i think that we're censored heavily without us even realizing it i mean just omitting a story from a newspaper is censorship that happens every day this is why media monopoly matters you really can silence uh different views you can silence dissent when a few media moguls own so much when you have just a few framing who is right and who is wrong who is evil and who is good the bush cheney administration has used vnr's to push their prescription drug plan and they've used it particularly heavily in in trying to spread the word about the weapons of mass destruction inside iraq that is no longer a mainstream media that's an extreme media beating the drums for war [Music] the campaign has been one of disinformation and misinformation the war in iraq was based on lies that's generally accepted it's interesting there's been no consequences this administration has sunk to the lowest level to use media and to use certain forms of it to deceive a nation [Music] weapons of mass approach threat to the united states dozens of ballistic missiles it is sponsored and sheltered terrorists paying suicide weapons or equally biological weapons including anthrax and botulism toxic biological and chemical agent to kill millions of people i remember the secretary of state saying we have to take the war to them before they bring it to us it simply makes no sense to wait any longer take action before it's too late delay in decision and inaction could lead to a massive and sudden horror but there should be criminal implications for this kind of behavior i think it's both subliminal and definitely uh very obvious i mean you have in the lead-up to protest the alert levels going up people being afraid what does fear do to a people it number one it blocks their thinking and if you continue to drum away that we are in danger of being attacked all the time then people do not broaden their thoughts it's our responsibility as journalists to let the public know who is paid by what corporation or if they're representing the government otherwise it's unforgivable the media is our lens on the world and it is absolutely critical we trust that media because ultimately when people are terrorized when people are targeted when people are marginalized that does not make any of us safer peace not war is our natural condition those who would bid us to war must be challenged when you start to talk about psyops of course people start looking for your tinfoil hat psychological operations is what i prefer because i up kind of sounds like it's a you know clandestine thing and i'm not into conspiracy theories per se the fact is that highly sophisticated ways of of incapacitating people of terrifying them making them anxious our military and our intelligence bureaus have been studying this kind of invisible weaponry for decades i mean it's at least as old as the cold war the main emphasis then is how do you crank out leaflets and things of that nature of course technology's moved considerably since then the focus today shifted dramatically so i think a more generic term of perception management how do you project the image of the army in this day and age the u.s government and military has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into propagandizing the iraqi people in paying newspapers reporters editors to plant stories in iraqi media now what does this do when you talk about the u.s military forces moving forward and there being victory and iraqis on the ground seeing that what they're seeing in their newspapers and on television doesn't reflect the reality it undermines any kind of growth of democracy because then they have no confidence no trust of their media in this country we have a law the smith month act against propagandizing our own population it goes back to the nazis in world war ii and we saw the dangers of that it's all justified by saying no it's giving information to other countries but donald rumsfeld has made it pretty clear that the success will be when it blows back so you plant a story there and it gets quoted back here the war is really being waged at home the war on truth in today's day and age as we know information is global and instantaneous so the ability to keep information out of american hands extremely difficult [Music] you know the gulf war was was interesting the first gulf war in the early 90s when when the whole war was taking place we were asked often you know are there new systems being used here because the way in which one of the largest armies in the world essentially gave up i mean it was like children in an elementary school on their first fire drill running out of the bunkers and surrendering and from my perspective it looked like one of these technologies for influencing behavior had been applied and it was the scottish media after the war that reported on project solo now we have very sophisticated systems like commando solo c-130 that's basically an airborne television radio station that circles the area broadcasting the message directly in that you want to have the enemy receive but one of the other things they do is they piggyback signals on other carriers in other words the broadcast already going on in the area in other words the muslim music and prayers that all of these troops were listening to every day they would piggyback a signal on that that would create anxiety and fear as an emotional state not that i'm aware of to disclose these technologies this changes everything one of the finest articles on the subject is an article called the mind has no firewalls and if you look at it it is a fine explanation of all of the various ways to carry a signal in that would influence human behavior at a distance whether you use tv radio electrical grids the internet all of these things can be effectively used and have been demonstrated these technologies that we're talking about today because the american public wouldn't accept them because the american public would see them as a violation of the constitution the only way they could be introduced is an environment of fear and what environment do we have today you know this is an occult issue outcomes razor the simplistic stuff works [Music] but the idea first was they looked at chemical means telepathing lsd all of the psychoactive drugs to see what would happen they also started to look at electromagnetic means even as early as that to manipulate behavior eventually it came out on the president's commission on the cia activities in the united states that eventually showed that the cia had been involved and the fbi involved in other agencies involved in mind control techniques being applied against american citizens without consent and mk ultra was a part of that and in what may be the weirdest turn of events so far the loudspeakers also pumped out tibetan monastery chants at steadily increasing volume named straight at rock van koresh's sanctuary they were warned that this could heighten matters and they decided to take the risk and those loudspeakers that were on vehicles were actually also delivering other information now we're talking about words and specific voices that people would recognize on a subliminal level that they would not consciously be aware of they tried a number of things we know that they tried the sounds of killing rabbits and things of that nature that are supposed to be you know intuitively and uh abhorrent noise that would affect you on a fear level to create fear and anxiety um really though you know when you think about it is that really the right thing you wanted to do in that environment or did you want to bring people to calmness to thinking more clearly to being more analytical you know what they did is they agitated the situation they created an explosive situation the results are now clear the simplistic stuff works harp is the high frequency active auroral research project was originally a joint effort of the air force and navy it's now run by darpa it's just dropped a little bit in terms of classification but it has multiple possibilities and lots of effects they just finished upgrading it from 48 antenna to 180. the the thing about haarp is an instrument designed to do exactly what person guru was talking about which is this idea of modulating the ionosphere uh in in a way that can be used for weapons applications uh why we're concerned about it is earth penetrating tomography an earth penetrating tomography in plain language or by analogy would be like x-raying the earth it's not using x-rays of course but it's the same concept predominantly has to do with communications because of our long-range communications we use you know bouncing the signal off and down what are the effects of bouncing a wave like that off of the ionosphere do you think probably very minimal it probably goes up and mostly goes down it's like punching the ionosphere and every punch of high frequency causes the ionosphere to vibrate in harmony that creates it converts the ionosphere from direct current to alternating current and that it behaves as a giant broadcast antenna pumping the signal back to the earth in the elf range [Music] in the case of elf where you have these very low pulsed signals you get what's called a frequency following response an ffr in the literature or brain entrainment is often referred to in that way and this is where the brain actually locks onto these external signals even these very very subtle signals it locks on and begins to mirror and so the brain patterns fall into those patterns which is a change in emotional state in the conspiracy arena they talk about a whole host of effects uh up to and including turning people into zombies or whole societies and the zombies and all that again the evidence against that is haven't got any societies or zombies our boob tube is doing a pretty good job on that but you know when you talk about conspiratorialists let's talk about the military and what their job is their job is to think of every horrible situation that could ever occur and then develop a plan around it that's conspiracy theorist at the ultimate level with billions and trillions of dollars to spend to figure it out [Music] [Music] [Applause] propagandists will go to any lanes to influence people's opinion including murders right i mean whoever's responsible for 911. are they doing it to kill those 3 000 people or are they doing it to influence the world [Music] they want people to follow orders push buttons stand in line they're afraid the death of the rogue mentality [Music] when you manipulate people it's anti-democratic what you're really trying to do is you're trying to control people people don't need to be controlled they need to be able to make their own decisions consciousness to freedom to think is a fundamental human right the idea of violating free will is something that even god doesn't do and yet man thinks they can do this [Music] at this defining moment change has come to america [Applause] um [Music] [Music] baghdad 3966 wives have glamour i am the queen of opulence this is mass madness you maniacs in god's name you people are the real thing we are the illusion so turn off your television sets turn them off now turn them off right now turn them off and leave them off turn them off right in the middle [Music] time again you wonder why [Music] i have a dream ask today what america will do for you but what together we can do for the freedom of man you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels upon the levers by all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop and you've got to indicate to the people who run it to the people who own it that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all if we can get a critical mass of people thinking a direction it will influence and change the rest of the world this collective mind this mind feel tend to lead me to believe that that might be the greatest hope man has [Music] [Music] [Music] you