Subliminal Read online

  Morley, Swan & Bramly were on the third floor – a plush open-plan set of offices and spaces with private areas set apart by off-white screens and partitions.

  Finding the receptionist was not easy and when at last she was shown the office door of Jonathan Woodbridge’s secretary, she had encountered at least five of the agency’s staff, all of whom had been enormously helpful and sympathetic to her plight. Of the receptionist, or the CEO’s secretary, there was no sign but she had acquired a cup of coffee in her travels, had seen a paste-up for a new advertisement to promote a lipstick, had been offered a free sample of a new toffee bar and been introduced to the latest bundle of joy born to one of the female staff. Given her social isolation over the previous four months, by the time she arrived at Woodbridge’s secretary’s door she felt as if she was suffering from sensory overload.

  One of the staff that had helpfully given her the guided tour opened the secretary’s door and suggested she take a seat until either one or the other of the absent bodies appeared. As she entered, almost simultaneously a door at the far side of the office opened and a young woman, attractively dressed and perfectly made up, came out carrying a sheaf of papers. She looked preoccupied and was a few strides into the office before she noticed there was someone waiting for her.

  ‘Oh – I’m sorry, I’m Emma Lilton, I believe I have an appointment with Mr Woodbridge.’

  The secretary gave a brief smile and immediately turned around and gave a knock on the door behind her. Still trying to avoid spilling all the papers she was carrying, she bent forward as she opened the door with her free hand and said, ‘Dr Lilton’s here – you were expecting her.’ Emma waited as the far door remained open but nothing vocal indicating an invitation escaped the open door. Then the secretary nodded her head and pushed the door back, at the same time turning to Emma and indicating by flapping her free hand that Emma should enter the far room. Given her recent experience, and less than convinced of what she might expect, Emma did as she was bid.

  The office she walked into was reasonably spacious but had a sense of order about it. The ubiquitous desk was directly in front of her as she entered. Up against one wall was a large bookcase fronted by a leather suite, forming a ring of seats around a circular coffee table. Here and there were small tables carrying odd pieces of office equipment – a table-top photocopier in one corner, a printer too, what appeared to be a drinks cabinet in another. The windows were smaller than she had become accustomed to, but the lighting was more than adequate.

  As for Jonathan Woodbridge, she was surprised and impressed.

  He stood at least six foot tall and had a slim, athletic look. He was dressed in a light blue, well-tailored suit which complemented his shirt and tie perfectly. His dark hair matched an olive complexion and he gave a very genuine and pleasing smile as she looked at him. He came towards her, his hand outstretched for a handshake. ‘Dr Lilton I presume, I’m very pleased to meet you.’

  Chapter 4

  EMMA LILTON WAS far from diminutive and although dressed formally with a severe hairstyle, she had a very feminine and attractive appearance. There was nothing nervous about her movements or her smile, which when he shook hands with her was assured, genuine and to him engaging. He greeted her in his usual manner.

  ‘Well, so glad to meet you at last Dr Lilton. I trust you’ve had the mandatory tour – we make it a rule that any visitor looking slightly lost gets the full treatment. Somewhat sycophantic and mercenary I’m afraid but then, to my staff, you might be a potential client! Bottom line… we are a business and we don’t miss an opportunity to impress where we can and get new commissions. Now, please – have a seat.’

  He turned and proffered one of the leather-backed chairs arrayed in front of his desk. As she moved forward he opened his office door and took the eye of his secretary. ‘Margaret, I’m busy for the next hour, no interruptions please!’

  He made his way back to his desk, sank into his executive chair and once again took stock of his visitor. She didn’t look insane, but then, too many times people he had met in his office offering a foolproof way of increasing turnover had lost sight of reality or were outrageously unpragmatic. Which way would this one go?

  ‘Well Dr Lilton, you got my attention when we spoke on Monday but I was left with a feeling that what you promised me was going to be very hard to deliver. Believe it or not, I’ve had any number of people sitting where you are today giving me an absolute assurance that they had a scheme able to energize our advertising beyond all previous success. Never – and I say again, never – has any one of them disclosed an approach that could or would work. That being the case you will forgive me if I tend to appear sceptical when new ideas are thrown at me. Now, on the basis that this is a fresh start, shall we begin?’

  He was surprised when she made no comment but simply lifted herself out of her chair and dropped a thick wad of stapled papers on to his desk. It had been orientated so that as he looked down at the top sheet he saw a printed heading; it read ‘Confidentiality Agreement’.

  She sat back in her chair. ‘I can’t disclose anything to you today unless it is under a non-disclosure agreement like the one before you. You can of course have it checked by your legal representatives but it’s quite conventional – it simply means that what we discuss today is not to be divulged to anyone else at any time – not even your principals, colleagues, friends, wife or lover.’

  He was briefly taken aback; for once he was in the company of someone that had a sensible business approach – and for the moment it threw him. If she wanted to negotiate under a confidentiality screen it could be that she really believed she had something valuable to tell him. If so, there was nothing stopping him agreeing to the contract. If it was valuable he would be a fool to broadcast it, if worthless there was nothing significant to disclose anyway, and the contract was futile.

  That he hesitated for some time did not appear to faze his visitor; she sat with legs crossed in her chair clutching a thick folder and looking at him with lovely blue-grey eyes. As he returned her look, she smiled. He took his pen from his inside jacket pocket, signed the last page of both agreements, and noting that no description of the confidence had been inserted in the justification, smiled with appreciation as he handed back both copies.

  ‘OK, I’m all yours Dr Lilton, you have my undertaking to keep this meeting and its contents secret, so fire away.’

  She smiled once more and took the folder she had been hugging and placed it on her lap.

  ‘Mr Woodbridge, I’m sure I’m an unknown quantity as far as you are concerned and I expect you to find what I am about to say implausible, but I assure you I can prove what I claim. First things first. I am, as I told you, a behavioural scientist; my work over the last seven years following on from my PhD has been with the Longmore Research Establishment located near Ashdown in Kent. We are – we were I should say – a multidisciplinary research operation taking on commissions from a wide range of corporate interests. I spent the last seven years as head of the psychology and behavioural sciences group. I won’t bore you with all that we did, and in any case I am myself prohibited by a composite non-disclosure agreement from telling you about it, but when I left the establishment I had just completed a research programme that has no restriction on disclosure and has no ties to any commercial interest belonging to Longmore or anybody else. The research I’m going to tell you about was done initially as a fascinating sideline. If the truth be told, the subject matter has interested me since my undergraduate days. With the assistance of one of my colleagues I investigated this subject intermittently over eighteen months carrying out a range of what were, in effect, secret experiments. I have here the results of those experiments and, if you still have the inclination, I would like to tell you about them.’

  He sat back further in his chair. She spoke authoritatively and in a way that made him want to know more – so, why not?

  ‘You seem to have your head screwed on, Dr Lilton. The agreement I just signed demonstrates that. OK, as I said before, you have my full attention, please carry on.’

  He watched as she settled further into her chair and opened the folder. She quickly scanned the first page in sight and looked up again.

  ‘Have you ever heard of subliminal advertising?’

  He had and the moment she said it his heart dropped. Dear God, another useless proposal.

  ‘Yes… Oh yes, sadly. What’s called subliminal imprinting, the insertion of visually imperceptible messages in a video programme or presentation has no benefit. I’m sorry to tell you that for all the many and several attempts to prove its efficacy, it doesn’t work! And even if it did, it’s illegal here in the UK and in the US. I’m sorry, Dr Lilton, but I think this terminates…’

  She leaned forward with a grim intensity. ‘Hear me out, Mr Woodbridge – what I am going to tell you does work, and it works extremely well.’

  She had leaned forward, almost out of her chair, now with a forceful, passionate expression.

  Since he found her so very striking he was torn between keeping her with him for a little while longer and not having his valuable time wasted by a pointless proposal. OK, another ten minutes – no more!

  ‘All right – go ahead, but please, don’t insult my intelligence.’

  She settled back in her chair again.

  ‘What you know of subliminal advertising starts with a man called James Vicary who in New York on the twelfth of September 1957 claimed to be able to increase sales by using subliminal insertions into normal cinema and TV commercials. He called a press conference to announce that he had increased the sales of Coca-Cola by 57.7 per cent and a well-known brand of popcorn by 18.1 per cent during a cinema programme. This, he said, had been achieved by flashing the slogans “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Eat More Popcorn” at a rate too fast for conscious perception while the films ran. As far as the viewer was concerned there was no conscious viewing of the slogans – they were visually imperceptible, supposedly too fast for conscious visual retention. It’s called “persistence of vision”. However, Vicary had to retract his claims when the cinema manager, who had allowed Vicary to employ the subliminal insertions, told a magazine called Motion Picture Daily that the experiment had no significant impact on sales during the trial. Vicary eventually confessed that he had not done enough research to make the claims he did. However, the whole thing created public disquiet and subliminal advertising was made illegal – just in case someone did make it work. However, it did not stop various research groups pursuing the idea and even up until quite recently experiments have been ongoing. In 2006 a University of Utrecht group in Holland managed to produce some significant effects from subliminal imprinting but only with brands or products less well known than the ones the audience were already very familiar with. Likewise, in 2015 the BBC ran a reasonably well-controlled experiment that again demonstrated no significant statistical advantage towards subliminal advertising. In short, if subliminal advertising has any effect at all, it is marginal and too little to be of use. Excuse me…’

  She paused and he could see that she was having trouble articulating her words – her mouth was drying up.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Lilton, very impolite of me – let me order some tea or coffee, what would you prefer?’

  ‘Tea if it’s no problem.’

  ‘Indeed, no problem.’

  He stood and walked over to the partitioning door. He opened it and to his relief found his secretary at her desk.

  ‘Margaret, tea for two please and very quickly if you would.’

  He returned to his desk and looked again at his visitor. She appeared relaxed and except for a white handkerchief wiping her lips, there was no sign of distress.

  ‘I see you have done your background research, Dr Lilton – I hope it is going to lead us to somewhere interesting.’

  She smiled and nodded her head. ‘You won’t be disappointed,’ she murmured through dried saliva and parched lips.

  He gestured towards the partition door. ‘Let’s wait until the tea gets here – I’m sure you will welcome it as I would. By the way, I assume you made your way here under your own steam – please, don’t forget to give me an expenses claim and your home address before you leave. We will be happy to meet your costs for today. Ah, here’s Margaret – tea for two.’

  He managed two cups of tea, his visitor three.

  As the third cup was drunk she reopened her folder and waited for him to become attentive.

  ‘What I have just told you about was subliminal imprinting in its usual form with the usual results. However, for a long time I felt that all past experiments missed a vital element – that it wasn’t just simply persistence of vision or the insertion of the subliminal frames into the one on show. Nor the fact that two visual messages were attempting subconscious recognition simultaneously. In these respects, I concluded that the idea was fundamentally wrong! I took the view that unless there was another, better way to convey the subliminal message, or more strongly imprint the primary message, the whole idea was futile. I decided that it was direct imprinting that offered the best chance of working. How subliminal imprinting might work no one appears to have investigated, nor has anyone speculated on what physiological or psychosomatic mechanisms might come into play. However, I did, and I started with the premise that it might be akin to a form of hypnosis – not conventional hypnosis, but allied to the sleep mechanism we all have in our brains. I started looking at brainwave patterns of which there are primarily four, alpha, beta, theta and my focus, the delta brainwave. The delta wave appears during sleep and in healthy individuals tends only to appear during sleep, but it is also known as the “reaper wave” because it also appears during death, disease or degeneration of the brain – hence delta. Tumours can produce the delta wave as well as epilepsy and other disturbances. However, its sleep origin made me think it could propagate information by imparting a quasi-sleep pattern, like in a dream, so I started to experiment with delta wave references. To cut a long story short we found that we had no need to include secondary short duration messages in the main visual programme. All we had to do was to mimic a typical generic delta wave by varying the intensity of the brightness of the main visual programme. This brightness we call luminance. In every case and in every experiment we found that the main programme had far more impact and audience retention if the luminance varied at between 0.4 and 5 cycles per second – the delta wave frequency. Not every individual is susceptible but we estimate that ninety-five per cent of subjects are.

  ‘Let me summarize – there is no need to interject short secondary messages into an advertisement. All you need to do is run a normal advertisement but vary the luminance at a rate that mimics a generic delta wave. Do that and you will get between eighty and ninety-five per cent audience retention. That will convert into a significant improvement in sales. And, by the way, it is virtually impossible to define this as conventional subliminal advertising, so it’s hardly illegal. It’s different, and in any case would be very hard to discover. All you need to do is to have a delta wave modulator attached to the master video luminance control, and that’s it. If you wish to see all the experimental data you are welcome, I’ll leave my folder with you, but it may not convince you as much as a single TV broadcast experiment. Are you willing?’

  He sat bemused and amazed.

  It was all very tempting – and yet dangerous territory.

  ‘What you say is very interesting but surely the variation in this luminance that you say is crucial to the subliminal effect would be obvious – it would like watching a movie from a projector that had a faulty bulb. The flicker would stand out like a sore thumb.’

  She smiled, and he could not help but think it was a lovely smile.

  ‘No, there is no “flicker” as you call it. The video is interlaced, twenty-five frames per second for broadcast but fifty because each frame is interlaced with another. It is the interlaced frame, blending with the previous one which carries the delta modulation – the variation in luminance is virtually imperceptible, the more so because we don’t use such a massive difference in brightness. The less there is the longer the imprint takes; the more there is, and the more obvious it is, the less time it takes. As long as we accept that it might take two or three showings of any given advertisement for the effect to take place the process will have the desired outcome.’

  He leaned forward, overwhelmed by her assertions and suddenly enlightened by the prospect of an undetectable way of enhancing his TV advertising. If what she said was true, if what she said worked, he had once more the edge on all his competitors. Not only that, he could become so successful that he could tell his board of directors to go hang – they would never be able to whinge, whine or criticize again. And yet…

  ‘Just a thought, Dr Lilton – but it would be a mistake to employ this technique constantly. It would be ridiculous if every advertisement we released suddenly broke all sales records. Your imprinting would have to be used sparingly at first, only with less well-known products but subject to a very big promotional campaign. That way we could simply point to the efficacy of the campaign without drawing too much attention to other factors. Do you agree?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, we would have to try its effect on something not already familiar in the consumer’s mind – so we can gauge the effect. Once we know how long the imprinting takes, we can use it to determine what level we need to use to ensure that no one becomes suspicious. If it’s a two-month campaign, we can ensure that the imprinting is so calculated that the sales improvements take the full two months to filter through – as such, everyone will assume it is the campaign which worked. We on the other hand will know differently.’