Subliminal advertising : new experimental data on the power of sexual embeds

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of subliminal advertising. In order to participate in the controversy and have a say in the topic we conducted an experiment in which we tested the following hypothesis: sexually aroused people will feel more attracted by the images containing sexual subliminal messages. We showed half the people in our sample 5 advertisements with sexual content with the purpose to increase their arousal; the other half watched 5 neutral advertisements. After that, all participants chose the image they liked most from each of the 7 pairs. The images were identical, except for the fact that one image had a sexual embed, and the other did not. Although the results are not statistically significant except for one case, they show a trend towards our predictions. We conclude that the experiment is worth to be repeated and we describe some implications.