Stepping gingerly away, for now, from the sad events of yesterday, I turn my mind to something altogether less difficult.
I was giving a lecture the other day during which I happened to mention that I had been using Google for several years before somebody finally pointed out to me that there were ads on the right side of the page. Not only had I never clicked on any of these ads, I had not even noticed them.
After my talk, a woman came up to me and pointed out that the fact that I had not noticed the ads did not mean they had been ineffective. “Do you think,” she asked, “that your buying patterns might have been influenced by the presence of those ads in the periphery of your vision?”
So. Perhaps these ads had been working on me all the time on a subliminal level, slipping in beneath my radar, as it were. But how could we test such a thing?
I’m thinking it would be interesting to run user tests in which we modify Google search pages (through some sort of proxy server, presumably). We would insert little artificial ad lines, mixed in with the real ads over on the right side of the page. These artificial ad lines could contain, for example, references to two different colors — one color for half of the participants, the other color for the other half.
After having been exposed to one or the other of these ads over a period of time, participants would be asked to chose one color from a selection of colors. If we see a systematic preference for the color mentioned in that participant’s artificial ads, then we will know that there is indeed a subliminal effect from these ads, even if the ad is never clicked on.
After all, if people are managing to put thoughts into your head, it might be useful to know about it.