[LINK] Aussie TV network guilty of subliminal ads

Stilgherrian stil at stilgherrian.com
Wed Oct 15 09:36:26 AEDT 2008


On 14/10/2008, at 6:54 PM, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> Well; for a start, the Wikipedia article simply assumes the positive
> hypothesis ... but regardless; while I agree that Ten was in breach of
> regulations, I personally don't believe that regulators should respond
> to pseudo-science as if it were true!


Agreed.

Crikey ran a good piece on this on Friday, alas behind the paywall for  
another week or so.
http://www.crikey.com.au/Media-Arts-and-Sports/20081010-Back-to-the-1950s-The-Age-and-Subliminal-advertising.html

     “The very word ‘subliminal’ carries a sinister ring,” says the  
opening line of
     [Friday's] Age editorial. Well, so does the phrase “alien  
abduction”, but that
     doesn’t mean it exists or that it’s a threat to society.

My 2c worth: There is an advert on the side of a bus, which flashes  
past us in the street. We barely see it, but the logo impresses itself  
'cos we're already familiar with it from other media. Should we ban  
buses (o bus advertising) because it's "subliminal"?

We walk quickly down the street, barely noticing the hundreds of  
commercial messages on billboards, shop hoardings, shop windows,  
street signage... but at some level we *have* seen them. Should we ban  
signs because we may not stop to pay them conscious attention? Or ban  
walking quickly, because it might expose us to dangerous subliminal  
messages?

And all this is based on the pseudo-science which imagines that just  
because a message is brief it is somehow more compelling, which it  
isn't -- or at least this hasn't been proven.

And so what if it is? Isn't 90%+ of the activity in our mind "sub- 
conscious" anyway?

Who are these idiots? Shoot them. Shoot them all.

Stil


-- 
Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/
Internet, IT and Media Consulting, Sydney, Australia
mobile +61 407 623 600
fax +61 2 9516 5630
Twitter: stilgherrian
Skype: stilgherrian
ABN 25 231 641 421



More information about the Link mailing list