This will be a short post today because I rambled on longer than intended with
yesterday's post about Dr. Robert Heath and how we process advertising.
Today I wanted to share an amazing example of how subliminal suggestion can work. Popular UK mentalist Derren Brown games two UK ad agency types (who doesn't love screwing with these agency wanks) by turning the tables on them through the power of subconscious priming. It's from a popular TV show, so you have to take it with a grain of salt, but even allowing for some manipulative editing, the clip is startling.
My plan was to analyze the reasons why this worked after you had a chance to watch the clip, but to be quite honest,
Steve Genco over at Lucid Systems does such a good job of this, I'd only be repeating him. So, you might as well go right to the source. I highly recommend reading Steve's analysis after you have a chance to watch the clip.
Now, the clip. The owners of the content don't allow for embedding of the player, so you'll have to go over to
YouTube to watch it (I know, I don't understand the rationale either). Then check out
Steve's post-mortem.