advertising
... and satisfaction”; therefore the “victim” is, first of all, interested to the product (first filter), then he/she will desire the product (second filter) and finally he/she will buy it. When advertisers have found out what our drives and ambitions are and what our fears are, they use these elements and play with them so as to propose them to us in a smart and moral way. Moreover, the images in advertising play an important role in the act of persuasion. In fact, when the buyer choses to buy a particular kind of jeans or perfume, it is not just because he really wants that product, but because he wants to express something that is connected to the message of the advertisement of that brand as well. Incidentally, Wilson Bryan Key, expert in psychology and communication theory, has studied the countless cases of subliminal advertisements, and he has recognized, for example, a 1 http://targetmarket.org/terge_11.htm http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Sections/advert01.html. 1 battered skull in a Bacardi drink or images of death and sex in ice cubes in drinks’ advertisements. He reckons that ads are particularly dangerous because they are done to be perceived in less than one second. Advertisers calculate that our primary sensory input is visual perception because we have over 130 million receptors in less than one square inch of optic nerves in our retina. So images, words, colours are structured in order to be captured by our unconscious mind by the time we have turned the page of the magazine. And, even though a period of time may have passed since you have seen a particular advertisement, you still have its message hidden in your head. This means that we have two kind of memory: the conscious memory, that is what we remember, and the subconscious memory, that is what we have recorded in our mind but we are not aware of. The latter works only if stimulated by something (a colour, a sound, a smell) which recalls something else. Hence advertisers use subliminal messages to stimulate subconscious memory and perception. Subliminal means ”below threshold”, something which stays under and beyond the line of consciousness. Therefore, subliminal perception is when someone sees or ears something even if he does not realize...