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Try Our Hard Pack
Copyright ©2004 by August Bullock. All Rights
Reserved
This Benson and Hedges advertisement appeared on the back cover of Time magazine in April, 1976. During this period, Time had a circulation of about four million and was read by about twenty million people. The cost of running a full page was approximately $75,000. The artwork could have cost $20,000. Since it was run many times in different periodicals, the total cost of the entire campaign probably exceeded half a million dollars.
Today, such an endeavor would be even more expensive. As I write this in 2003, running a full-page ad on the back cover of Time magazine costs $272,700. Thanks to computers, the cost of producing the artwork hasn’t gone up as much, but could still amount to $25,000. In total, millions of dollars would be required to run the ad repeatedly in several magazines around the country.
With so much money at stake, the Benson and Hedges ad was certainly not created haphazardly. It was produced by a team of skilled technicians, utilizing research data accumulated over several decades. It was scrutinized and refined in the same manner that an artist works on a painting. Since most people barely glance at advertisements, and few read the copy, it was designed to influence a disinterested viewer in the space of a few seconds.
The picture appears to portray a young couple sensually embracing each other. From the way they are dressed it appears they have been on a date, and have returned to one of their homes for a drink. A bottle of wine has been opened and two untouched glasses are on the table.
The caption prominently proclaims “If you got crushed in the clinch with your softpack, try our new hard pack.” The play on the words “hard” and “soft” is difficult to overlook. Even on a conscious level, the ad seems to be promising male potency and virility.
The woman is extremely lovely. She is pressing herself against the man eagerly and seductively, as if she can’t wait for him to return her caresses and make passionate love to her.
The man is staring at the viewer with a strange look on his face. If you only glanced at the picture for a moment or two you would probably assume he is thinking, “If you smoked Benson and Hedges you’d have beautiful women chasing after you too.” If you study his expression, however, you will discover that it is somewhat ambiguous. He could be smug, but he also could be a bit nervous. His collar is too big, and a small amount of sweat appears on his nose. The aggressive advances of the beautiful young woman seem to be making him uncomfortable.
The man’s expression suggests that he shares a secret with male
readers that the woman doesn’t know about.
Whatever could his secret be? I hung the ad on my wall for several weeks,
and one morning it suddenly jumped out at me.
Look carefully at the man’s left hand, the lower hand in the photo.
It is resting gently against the lady’s backbone.
The lady’s backbone has been carefully airbrushed to resemble an
erect, male phallus.
In the scale of the photograph it is approximately 6 1/2 inches long.
The man’s fingers are clearly wrapped around the base of the shaft.
His left thumb is gently touching the ridge of the circumcised head.
Moreover, the tip of the penis is provocatively entering a large cylindrical
curl formed by the lady’s hair.
The phallus may take a few minutes to fully emerge in your consciousness,
but when it does it will become dramatically obvious. A close-up is provided
in Figure 1.3 on page 16.
The longer you look at the illusion the clearer it will become. If you
put this book away and pick it up again tomorrow, the penis will seem
even more apparent. The change in perception is usually permanent-you
will never look at the picture again and only “see” a backbone.
You have just discovered a subliminal embed, an optical illusion implanted
in the ad in order to influence you without your realizing it. Although
it may at first seem unbelievable, subliminal messages of this kind have
been commonly used in all forms of media for the last five decades. You
probably have been exposed to millions of them in your lifetime.
The Not So Soft Sell
Once the subliminal content of the Benson and Hedges ad becomes conscious, the intent of it becomes fairly obvious. The caption “If you got crushed in the clinch with your soft pack, try our hard pack” unconsciously means “If you are nervous about sexual intimacy, smoke Benson and Hedges to compensate.” The ad reinforces tobacco dependencies by upsetting the viewer (by triggering impotency anxieties), and then providing relief (smoking Benson and Hedges). Television mouthwash commercials that threaten the viewer with sexual rejection employ a similar (although less sophisticated) strategy.
Another way to understand how the ad “works” is to think about the fact that people smoke more when they are nervous. Accordingly, making them nervous increases their smoking. If the ad consciously upset the viewer (if the tag line said, “Hey, you’re impotent, aren’t you!”) the consumer would feel resentful and the advertisement would fail. Because the viewer is subliminally agitated, however, the anxiety/smoking “loop” is activated without awareness or resentment. Although it may at first seem counterintuitive, the “Secret Sales Pitch” is very logical.
Ernest Dichter, the self-proclaimed “father of motivational research,” wrote in The Handbook of Consumer Motivations:
We attempt to escape fear-producing stimuli. By producing fear we can alter people’s behavior. When caught in fear, we regress step by step to ever more infantile and animalistic drives.” (Emphasis added.)
The Benson ad unconsciously provokes fears of sexual failure. In response, the viewer engages in infantile fantasies of being breast fed and nurtured. On a subliminal level, the ad proposes cigarettes are an alternative to Mommy’s milk.
The Secret Sales Pitch
Wilson Bryan Key’s books were exceedingly popular. Subliminal Seduction sold over a million copies, and the three books he wrote subsequently sold a million more copies collectively. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, he appeared on countless radio and TV shows, and gave slide presentations all over the United States. He single-handedly made much of the world at least peripherally aware of subliminal advertising in media.
In some respects, however, his work was not taken as seriously as it should have been. Some researchers denigrated it as “pop psychology,” and criticized it for lacking scientific credibility. Advertisers scoffed at it altogether. They claimed subliminal embeds are coincidences, and ridiculed Key’s less persuasive examples. As a result, the controversy fizzled to a draw, and has never been intelligently resolved. Although many people have heard of subliminal advertising, they don’t understand the cognitive principles that underlie its effectiveness.
This book will explore how subliminal salesmanship has been routinely employed in every form of media, on many different levels, for many decades. It will:
1. Present many convincing examples, never before published in a book
of this kind, that illustrate a variety of subliminal techniques;
2. Coherently explain how subliminal devices in media operate on a scientific,
psychological level, and how they relate to published studies of perception;
3. Describe how anyone can use subliminal techniques to enhance art as
well as advertising.
Readers might arguably be skeptical of any of the individual advertisements or interpretations in this book. When all the evidence is considered, however, one cannot escape the conclusion that media plays with our minds in ways we are oblivious to.
Subliminal ads are particularly fascinating when they are viewed in conjunction with the psychological principles they illustrate. They reveal much about our psyches we would prefer to avoid. Analyzing how advertisers manipulate us unconsciously improves our understanding of both society and our secret selves
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