1. The board game ad that changed the law
In the run-up to Christmas 1973, American television viewers saw an ad for a children’s memory game called Hūsker Dü? Most noticed nothing unusual about it.
But hidden inside the commercial, flashed too briefly to register, were two words: Get it.
Someone did notice. Complaints reached the US Federal Communications Commission, and in early 1974 the FCC issued a formal statement declaring that subliminal advertising was “contrary to the public interest”, whether or not it actually worked. Broadcasters using it risked their licences.
It’s an odd footnote in history: one of the most significant official rulings on subliminal messages in the United States was triggered by a toy ad.
2. The broadcaster that tested it live on air
Fifteen years earlier, in 1958, Canada’s national broadcaster had tried a bolder experiment. During a Sunday night programme, the CBC flashed a hidden message on screen hundreds of times. Then it told viewers what it had done and asked them to write in and guess the message.
The message was Phone now. Nobody phoned the station, and of the hundreds of viewers who wrote in, none guessed correctly.
What some of them did report was feeling oddly hungry or thirsty during the show. They were probably thinking of the famous popcorn story that had made headlines the year before. The messages had no effect. The expectation clearly did.
3. The “RATS” in the political ad
In September 2000, during the US presidential race, a Republican TV ad attacking Al Gore’s prescription drug plan showed the word BUREAUCRATS sliding across the screen. For a fraction of a second, only the last four letters were visible: RATS.
Democrats called it a subliminal smear. The ad’s creator insisted it was an accident, just an animated “visual drumbeat” to keep the screen lively. Senators asked the FCC to investigate, and the campaign quickly pulled the ad.
Whether it was deliberate has never been settled. What’s certain is that it got vastly more attention once people knew it was there than it ever could have while hidden.
4. The demon in The Exorcist
When The Exorcist opened in 1973, audiences fainted, fled cinemas and reported nightmares for weeks. Part of the reason may have been something few of them consciously saw.
Director William Friedkin had spliced split-second flashes of a ghostly white demonic face into several scenes. Many viewers never registered them at all. Others caught only a vague impression that something terrible had flickered past.
This is the most famous deliberate use of hidden flash frames in cinema. Did it work? It’s impossible to separate their effect from the rest of a deeply unsettling film. But Friedkin clearly believed a glimpse you aren’t sure you saw can be more frightening than one you are.
5. The man who appeared before he existed
In Fight Club (1999), Brad Pitt’s character Tyler Durden flashes onto the screen for single frames, several times, before the narrator has supposedly met him. He’s standing in a hospital corridor, or in the background of a scene.
Most first-time viewers never notice. On a second viewing, frame by frame, the flashes become clues to the film’s central twist. The flash frames here aren’t trying to sell anything. They’re a puzzle for the audience to solve.
6. The Disney video recall
In January 1999, Disney recalled around 3.4 million home videos of its 1977 animated film The Rescuers. In two frames of a single scene, someone had added an inappropriate image of a woman in a background window during the film’s original production, more than twenty years earlier.
At normal speed it was invisible. It had been there for decades, and no one had ever reported being influenced by it.
The case neatly illustrates a distinction that often gets lost. A hidden image can be completely unacceptable, a breach of trust with audiences and parents, without having any measurable effect on anyone. Unethical and effective are two different questions.
7. The ad that wanted to be caught
By 2006, KFC had turned the whole idea on its head. It ran a US TV ad with a hidden code word that could only be read by slowing the ad down, frame by frame. Viewers who found it could claim a free chicken sandwich.
KFC openly called it “reverse subliminal” advertising. Instead of slipping a message past viewers, it dared them to find it. The gimmick worked brilliantly, not because anyone was secretly influenced, but because thousands of people spent time deliberately studying a commercial.
The most famous one of all
These seven sit alongside the stories everyone already knows. There’s James Vicary’s 1957 claim that flashing “Eat Popcorn” in a New Jersey cinema had boosted sales, which he later admitted didn’t hold up. There are the backwards messages supposedly hidden in rock records, and the subliminal self-help tapes that, when tested, worked only for people who believed in them. We tell those stories in full in our article on whether subliminal messages work, and go deeper into the commercial side in subliminal messages in advertising.
What they all have in common
Look at the seven examples together and a pattern appears.
The hidden messages themselves did very little. The toy ad sold no extra games that anyone could measure. The CBC’s viewers didn’t phone. Disney’s frames influenced nobody for twenty years.
What did have power was the story about the message. The FCC acted because people were alarmed. CBC viewers felt hungry because they expected to. “RATS” mattered only after it was discovered. KFC’s code worked precisely because people knew it was there.
That’s the real lesson of subliminal messages, and a useful one for understanding hypnosis too. Influence rarely comes from words slipped past your awareness. It comes from what you pay attention to, what you expect, and the stories you’ve been told. If you’re new to the subject, our introduction to what subliminal messages are explains the science behind the myths.
Further reading
- Federal Communications Commission. “Public Notice Concerning the Broadcast of Information by Means of ‘Subliminal Perception’ Techniques.” 44 F.C.C. 2d 1016 (1974). This is the FCC statement that followed the toy ad complaints.
- Moore TE. “Subliminal advertising: what you see is what you get.” Journal of Marketing. 1982;46(2):38–47. It’s a classic review of the history and evidence, including early broadcast tests.
- Pratkanis AR. “The cargo-cult science of subliminal persuasion.” Skeptical Inquirer. 1992;16(3):260–272. It’s a readable history of the subliminal scare and the Vicary affair.
- Pratkanis AR, Aronson E. Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. W.H. Freeman, revised edition 2001. It’s an accessible book, with a chapter on subliminal persuasion.
- Berke RL. “Democrats see, and smell, ‘rats’ in G.O.P. ad.” The New York Times, 12 September 2000. This covers the RATS ad.
- Friedkin W. The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir. HarperCollins, 2013. This is the director’s own account of making The Exorcist.
- Fincher D. Director’s commentary, Fight Club, special edition DVD, 20th Century Fox, 2000. Fincher discusses the Tyler Durden flash frames.
- News coverage of Disney’s recall of The Rescuers home videos, January 1999. Reported widely, for example by the Associated Press and BBC News.
- News coverage of KFC’s “reverse subliminal” TV ad, 2006. Reported widely, for example by the Associated Press.