Subliminal Advertising

We had written a term paper and made a presentation on the subject in term 4. The group consisted of the esteemed Ms Thakur (as in - Shweta Thakur, lady who directed the public production in second year, who painted Dudu's, woman of spirit, woman of substance, who sometimes combined the two, etc) and yours truly (as in - yours truly). It was quite eventful – like all 9 am presentations I have done. Thakur had to present first and speak of how subliminal advertising came to be (the famous eat popcorn, drink coke story), how companies have used it thus far, and theories supporting it. I was supposed to talk about why it won’t work, theories which do not support it so on and so forth.

In case you don’t know, Subliminal Advertising the concept of putting arbit high recall pictures within normal images be it print or an AV. In Fight Club – this was one of Tyler’s’ many jobs – when he inserts porn (not so mild versions of it) between normal movie scenes for kicks ( ok - it was not advertising, but was subliminal nevertheless). In print, it is mostly a small part of an image – the ice cubes in the glass of booze looking like a couple having sex or a skull and so on. But mostly, it is about sex. The theory says that while we don’t recognize these images as they are, our subconscious mind recognizes them and prompts a purchase over other normal looking ads which do not have people having sex, etc in miniature print. This seemed like an interesting thing to work on, like most things do in a B School until the work arrives.

I woke up at 8.30 and finished the last 2 of my 4 slides. It looked alright. My part was ready. I then started looking for Thakur, who wasn’t to be found anywhere (Why I didn’t call her might be a very good question to ask at this point of time, but in true Dan Brown style, I just wanted to tell you using this parenthesis that is going to unveil later). At 8.55 am, I gave up looking and headed for class. I had a feeling I would find her there. I was slightly tense about not having found her. Adding to the tension was the fact that – apart from having discussed the topic (the previous night, of course), and deciding broadly who would be doing what (I vaguely remembered Thakur telling it to me while I was playing AOE), we had not done very much else with respect to “discussing”.

But the good thing is Thakur was also there on her way to class. She yelled at me for not picking my phone. I put the sheepish grin, and she realized it too. My phone would be lying under a heap of clothes, what not in my room ( if at all)– and no way anyone would find it. In all my B School life, I would have found it twice, and not once when I needed it. The good thing though, was that she had finished her part too. Excellent! So the presentation was ready. It was 9.05 as the prof (who in this case also happened to be the Director, affectionately known by all as ‘Diro’) walked into class. I was really hoping that he would take attendance, giving us sometime at least. Instead, he walked upto one of the empty students’ chairs, sat down and said out loud, “group number (whatever our group number was)”. This is approximately when both of us (Thakur and I, members of the group) were frantically asking fellow junta for the device the pen drive.

Diro, in the meantime, was tapping his fingers and all this, in general added to my tension as many ideas ran through my brain.

Should we go ahead and present it from different laptops? -

Should Thakur just start now (oh wait, she cant, no one has put the projector on, bloody CRs!!)?

Why cant I just copy paste it from one ppt to the other, how stupid am I – should have thought about it earlier??!

Somewhere in between these thoughts Diro had once said “Why is your presentation not ready yet?” To which Thakur answered something. Obviously, that was not a good or a funny answer because Diro retorted with “you lose 10 marks for starting late”, and did not smile/seem amused.

So I had just finished setting the projector, and Thakur had finished copying the presentations on to one sane laptop. And we started presenting the presentation titled “Subliminal Advertising”. It was an encouraging start, since we started with only half the junta asleep. 5 minutes into the presentation, the numbers of people who were sleeping had increased only by one, which is very good by any 9 am class standards. Thankfully, both of us spoke about the similar stuff on subliminal advertising. As in, if you spend less than an hour on a presentation, you won’t go beyond the first three or four hits Google throws up – so our sources were the same. We concluded that “A lot of companies use Subliminal Advertising, but no one can really be sure if it increases sales”. Diro was also fairly impressed.

Now why would I write about something like this almost a year and a half after it happened? Because I saw this in one of my favourite malls in Gurgaon.

There is slightly more to it than meets the eye, but don’t look too hard. I don’t think the Fashion Cube guys do it intentionally. I think their creative brief was on the lines of “ Er.. nothing complicated– give us the average bikini babe who can sell anything, we are keeping options open currently”. But I am sure they ended up getting more than they asked for, at least from people like me and the people I show it to :-).

There is also a theory about subliminal advertising which says that it is endorsed by people who have nothing else to do in their free time. These juntas, the theory says, interrogate images for hours till twisted patterns emerge from it, and then feel much contended at the way the last hour was spent. What are the chances some of them have taken to blogging?