Anyone Testing Subliminal Ads / LPs? (11)
I was going through some of my old projects and stumbled across notes I took on something I always wanted to try.. putting subliminal messages in ads or landing pages. This is kind of a dirty trick and not sure if it's even legal or not lol 
If you design an animated GIF you can have 1 frame flash a message the users brain wont consciously register but their subliminal will. Something that will trigger a very strong emotional reaction like "I'm tired of being fat, ugly and worthless" for a weight loss ad. You could get them to process text that hits buying triggers that would turn them off if you wrote it directly in the ad. Instead it will be processed in their mind as their own internal thought haha.. so evil 
Also these ads would pass manual review..
When designing your landing page I'm sure you can have a developer make you some code that will flash text every x milliseconds so it becomes a subliminal message.
Has anyone ever messed around with this? What were your results? 
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Here's some of the notes I took from random places discussing the topic:
The Reis Limen or threshold of perception is 4ms. At 4ms if I flash a single character somewhere on the screen you have about a 50/50 chance of knowing I did it. You probably only have about a 20 percent chance of guessing it correctly.
If I flash it at 1ms you will not know. It is subliminal, below the Reis Limen.
If I flash the same character 100 times at 1 ms all over the screen. You will swear the screen is covered in the character. There can be no mistaking it, even though it is below the Reis Limen. Unperceptable as a single exposure.
The rule of thumb is that the number of exposures times the duration of exposures times the intensity of exposures = effectiveness of exposure.
I would add to that multiplying by the number of sources of exposure.
Yes there is such a thing. We gate and filter our attention. The senses are take in more than the mind can handle unfiltered. Some forms of mental illness are from an inability to filter. Some forms of schizophrenia for example. Such schizophrenics are highly susceptible to subliminal triggers.
I don't have any experience of the above but I can confirm that I've just wired $10,000 to you.
This would only work with branding campaigns.. so the answer is no.
I'd love to see some campaign data around this. It could be seriously interesting!
Finch has discussed subliminal advertising in the past in one of his Premium Posts series. An interesting read!
Seems like it would be pretty easy to test how effective it is I'll try and run a split test and share the results.
I think I'm going to do a test on a dating campaign.
Ad 1 and Ad 2 will be the exact same except Ad2 will have a subliminal image of some nice tits or a horny woman or something. If it works I'd imagine quite a large difference in CTR. Also the ads should get approved just about anywhere
I found an interesting service (their website looks terrible lol..) they had some legal information which is useful.
sublimads(.)com
Is SA legal?
Yes, everywhere but on TV or radio. Absolutely 100% legal in most countries including the USA and Canada (but not the UK or Australia). The US considered restricting subliminal advertising in the 1940's but there is no American legislation at all against subliminal advertising today. The FCC, who regulates TV and radio broadcasts, has forbid the use of subliminal advertising yet has never fined any broadcaster once for its use.
Members of the American Broadcasting Association have agreed not to use subliminal advertising but there is no monitoring and usage is by no means against the law.
damn.. there's a major problem with animated gifs.. it can't switch frames fast enough to make them subliminal. photoshop is limiting me to 0.01s I can't go any lower and apparently browsers will slow down the frame change even further:
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Mozilla's rendering engine: a 1/100 delay is changed to 10/100.
Internet Explorer: Any delay less than 6/100 is changed to 10/100.
Opera: Every delay below 10/100 is displayed at 10/100.
Safari: Changed to 3/100
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The switch is fully visible (NSFW):
http://s30.postimg.org/x1o81yehd/sub_L.gif
I guess the only option left is landing page subliminals and maybe flash ads would work?
I have my developer putting some javascript together that can be attached to html text and images to make them flash at a set rate. Will share it when it's ready 
I would be very surprised if this has any impact. Modern humans are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages and ads everyday. The idea that a frame of 1/24th of a second will make any difference does seem to stretch the realms of believability.
But hey, test it out.
If it get a statistically significant upward result, I will buy you a steak dinner.
Another problem you will have is ad networks limit the speed at which you can animate banners to a minimum frame rate. Anything beyond that they consider 'strobing' and their system wont approve your banners. Besides, this won't really work as banner blindness and many other factors are against you.
Originally Posted by chayes
From what I understand the newest Flash Players are capped at a maximum of 60fps, no matter what number you use to set the framerate.
Would be interested to see the test results
I also doubt that old-school style subliminals (as opposed to the in-image subliminal stuff Finch discussed) will work very well.
If you want to get it going, though, I'd look at Javascript rendering to canvas. That should get you past the framerate block if anything will.
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