Covert Operations

Covert priming corresponds to what Vance Packard triumphantly reported as having made the front page of the London Sunday Times in 1956: 

“certain United States advertisers were experimenting with ‘sub-threshold effects’ in seeking to insinuate messages to people past their conscious guard.”

To this day we speak of prime time, just as we speak of radio and television programming. And we think nothing of it. 

At the same time, social science scholars seem to fall over themselves to argue or better said to insist that there is no such priming effect or else that it is very general or very minimal, seemingly to reassure confidence in consumer choice and free will: it is not for nothing that a leading research trend in the social sciences is called rational choice.

Thus an abundance of studies (particularly in disciplines not contributing to marketing research) insist upon the inefficacy of priming, not unlike US academic confidence in the non-existence of propaganda in United States. 

Yet and at the end of the day, empirical research repeatedly confirms that “priming” (that would be what the popular press calls “subliminal persuasion”) does indeed work, down indeed to the brand itself.