The Secret Pitch
Leave it to our friends, the gears in the political machine, to enliven a typically bland September in a presidential election year with talk of dirty advertising. Is there another kind?
By now you've heard how the Republican National Committee put together an ad for its phonetic candidate, George Dubya Bush, in which the word RATS briefly appears just as the voiceover comments on Democratic candidate Al Gore's drug plan.
The facts are plain. RATS was short for BUREAUCRATS, the word that was visually bouncing around the screen during that moment of the ad. Accordingly, the RNC cannot be accused of inserting subliminal messages. However, you know darn well that someone had to make the decision to have only that part of the word BUREAUCRATS appear at that instant. The software used to edit the ad does not decide for itself. A human was most certainly behind it. Why not show the first half of the word? The middle?
So I am decidedly split on this particular issue. While I don't think there was a dastardly scheme to equate the vice president's politics with those of vermin, I do think that the happy accident -- discovered long before the ad ever hit the airwaves -- pleased the RNC. I'm sure they figured they'd get away with it. After all, the message wasn't truly subliminal. If you know it's coming, you can see it fairly clearly. (In case you'd like to view it, log on to political.adcritic.com.)
Last week, Dubya proclaimed he did not believe the ad was engineered to deliver a secret message. And then he promptly removed it from the advertising rotation. Draw your own conclusions.
The general public and, by and large, the media have bought into the notion that advertisers are brain-washers, dabbling perpetually in the use of subconscious persuasion. For every heavy-handed ad we catch, they say there are hundreds more out there. Big Brother ain't just a show on ABC, they say.
Someone is pulling the strings. The advertising industry washes its hands of the charges, saying we're giving them far too much credit. They neither have nor use that kind of power. A columnist in this week's Advertising Age goes so far as to dismiss subliminal tactics as another example of the general public's gullibility.
"People believe (subliminal advertising) actually happens," writes Bob Garfield. "And why wouldn't they? They also believe in Sasquatch, Atlantis and alien corpses in Roswell, N.M."
That's great, Bob. Call us a mindless herd while you're at it. It's foolish to think that only conspiracy theorists and Unabomber types believe advertisers work below our perception radar. In the 1980s, a Journal of Advertising study found that, of the people who knew what subliminal advertising was, over 50 percent believed it was used "always" or "often."
After the RATS episode, expect that number to spike higher. Not helping matters is technology. With AVID, After Effects, Photoshop and a slew of other video production software available to anyone with a credit card, absolutely anyone can throw an invisible message into anything. The word "sex" suddenly can appear in a Nabisco cracker. A penis can flash on the screen during a cartoon. Anything is suddenly possible.
And people were afraid in the 1950s when movie theater owner James Vicary boasted that he'd slipped messages into his audience's heads and caused them to eat more concessions? Just imagine what ad guys can do now.
I don't honestly understand the outrage. Wake up, America. Advertisers manipulate us every day, telling us that if we smoke this brand or order that beer that a Playmate will suddenly appear. It's worse than a screen flash: It's an unabashedly obvious lie!
And it's everywhere. Take this column, for instance. If you take the first letter of each paragraph of this article and unscramble them, you too can enjoy a secret message.
Did you look? Maybe you buy it, too.
