Subliminal ads made moviegoers buy more popcorn and Coca-Cola

Subliminal ads made moviegoers buy more popcorn and Coca-Cola
	FALSE
	"Flashing the messages "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coca-Cola" on a movie screen too quickly to be consciously seen increased popcorn sales by 57.5 percent and Coca-Cola sales by 18.1 percent."
Domain	Technology & Media
Tactic	Fabrication; Pseudoscience / Junk Science;
Era	Historical
First seen	1957
Origin	Market researcher James Vicary, announced at a press conference in New York in September 1957
Last reviewed	2026-10-26
	Further reading: books on Technology & Media

The claim that subliminal ads made moviegoers buy more popcorn and Coca-Cola is the founding myth of subliminal advertising. In 1957 a market researcher named James Vicary announced that he had flashed hidden messages during film screenings at a cinema in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and produced dramatic increases in sales. The announcement caused a national scare about mind control, prompted regulators to act and gave rise to a belief, still widespread, that advertisers secretly manipulate people with invisible messages. Vicary later admitted that his experiment had been a gimmick and that he had too little data to support any conclusion. There is no evidence that his reported results were real.

The claim

Vicary said that over six weeks in the summer of 1957, during screenings of the film Picnic, a device projected the words "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coca-Cola" onto the screen every five seconds for about 1/3,000 of a second, far too briefly for viewers to notice. He claimed that about 45,000 moviegoers had been exposed to the messages, and that popcorn sales rose by 57.5 percent and Coca-Cola sales by 18.1 percent compared with normal.

Vicary presented this as a breakthrough in "subliminal projection," a technique that could deliver messages directly to the unconscious mind. He set up a company, the Subliminal Projection Company, to sell the method to advertisers and broadcasters.

Origin

Vicary announced his results at a press conference in September 1957. The timing was significant. Earlier that year Vance Packard had published The Hidden Persuaders, a bestseller about motivational research and the psychological techniques used by advertisers. Cold War anxieties about brainwashing were also high, following reports about the treatment of American prisoners of war in Korea. Vicary's claim seemed to confirm the worst fears of the age.

The reaction was intense. Newspapers and magazines ran alarmed commentary. The writer Norman Cousins, in the Saturday Review, called for the invention to be taken apart and destroyed. Members of Congress called for investigations and legislation. Broadcasters, including the National Association of Broadcasters, moved to bar the technique from television.

What the evidence shows

The experiment as described does not appear to have taken place in any meaningful form. Vicary never published a detailed report, data or methodology that could be checked. Researchers who tried to replicate his results failed. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tested a subliminal message on television in 1958, flashing the words "phone now" hundreds of times during a program, no increase in telephone calls was recorded, and viewers who were asked to guess the message offered a wide range of wrong answers.

Later reporting cast doubt on whether the Fort Lee experiment happened at all. According to accounts gathered by researchers, the theater manager said no such test had been run, and the small size of the theater made the claimed audience of 45,000 implausible over the time period described.

In a 1962 interview with Advertising Age, Vicary acknowledged that the original study had been a "gimmick" and that the amount of data was too small to be meaningful. By then his company had folded.

Laboratory research since then has found that very brief, subliminal exposure to words or images can have small, short-lived effects under tightly controlled conditions. A 2006 study by Johan Karremans and colleagues, for example, found that subliminally presented brand names could slightly increase the choice of a particular drink, but only among participants who were already thirsty. Those findings are narrow and do not support the idea that hidden messages can make people buy products they do not want, or that they work in the noisy conditions of a cinema or a television broadcast.

Why it persists

The claim persists because it fits a common fear: that powerful institutions can control our behavior without our knowledge. It also sounds scientific, with precise percentages and a technical-sounding name. The regulatory response gave it a further air of legitimacy. In 1974 the US Federal Communications Commission issued a policy statement declaring subliminal advertising "contrary to the public interest," and several other countries banned or restricted the practice. People sometimes reason that if it was banned, it must have worked.

The idea was revived in later decades, notably by Wilson Bryan Key's 1973 book Subliminal Seduction, which claimed to find hidden sexual images in advertisements, and by the 1990 trial in which the heavy metal band Judas Priest was sued over alleged hidden messages in its music. The court ruled for the band. Self-help "subliminal" audio tapes sold widely in the 1980s and 1990s; controlled studies found they did not produce the promised effects.

Lessons for readers

Precise numbers are not proof. A figure such as 57.5 percent can be invented as easily as a round one.
Ask for the data. A claim announced at a press conference with no published method or results has not been tested.
Look for replication. Vicary's results were never reproduced.
Be wary of claims that confirm the fears of the moment. The subliminal scare took hold because it fitted Cold War anxieties about brainwashing.
Regulation is not evidence of effectiveness. Authorities sometimes act on public alarm before the science is settled.

Sources

Stuart Rogers, "How a Publicity Blitz Created the Myth of Subliminal Advertising," Public Relations Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1992–93).
Anthony R. Pratkanis, "The Cargo-Cult Science of Subliminal Persuasion," Skeptical Inquirer 16, no. 3 (1992).
Fred Danzig, interview with James Vicary, Advertising Age, 1962.
Johan C. Karremans, Wolfgang Stroebe and Jasper Claus, "Beyond Vicary's Fantasies: The Impact of Subliminal Priming and Brand Choice," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42, no. 6 (2006).
Federal Communications Commission, public notice concerning broadcast of information by means of subliminal perception techniques, 1974.
Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (David McKay, 1957).