How to do a marketing blitz like Lady Gaga!

[Ankesh]

Thanks Duane. Very interesting.

Here is a fairly comprehensive wikipedia page on subliminal stimuli:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli

1.
Subliminal ads work. But is it really subliminal is debatable.

For eg:

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, t he olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rgh it pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Our brains are awesome at expatiating. Even if you can't read the whole word, you can expatiate the right word from just the first 2 letters.

And because of the effect of "recency", also expatiate correctly from 1 letter too.

2.

Subliminal experiments have only ever worked when the input was small in size. It worked for words. Not for phrases.

3.

There was an experiment done where the folks were shown a video of 2 teams playing basketball. And they were asked to count how many times the ball is bounced.

The video had a mascot in bear suit pass through it. But half the people didn't notice it.

This was not subliminal - and yet people didn't notice it. Because their brains was focused on some other task.

Keep this experiment in mind for the next bullet paragraph.

4.

People were subliminally shown the word "beef". Then they were shown 5 food products - only 1 of them with beef. And asked to select 1 that they would like to eat. Beef was not selected more times than usual.

But when people were given a survey after that - the group that was shown beef did say they were hungrier than the control group (the people who didn't receive any subliminal stimuli.)

Your brain is awesome at expatiating. But its very poor at remembering what it has expatiated. No focus = no memory. But the stimuli is still there.

So its a murky area. You can't just expect magical results from adding sublminal stimuli to your ads. Adding the words "Buy Now" won't make people buy your product. It may make them enjoy shopping more though.