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Like you, I’m really skeptical about how the subliminal experiment was portrayed in the video. I’ve ridden in a lot of cabs, and I just can’t fathom picking up an array of images and slogans, neatly hidden in their complex environments, and then assembling them into a single presentation that mimics another person’s assemblage of the imagery. It isn’t even very likely that I would look out of the cab window at the right times to get everything I was supposed to discover. For me, “that dog don’t hunt.”

But I do buy the idea that the subconscious is very powerful and even a little mysterious. And the brand names/logos we are exposed to every day are working on us subconsciously, even if they are not all that subliminal.

In fact, this seems quite relevant to an article from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about companies that buy ‘dead’ brands: brands that still exist as intellectual property, but are no longer actually sold anywhere, like Brim Coffee. They bank on the high degree of recognition–and maybe a little nostalgia–for the brands to stick them back on products (products which are often actually different from the original).

This also brings up the old question of how many brands we’re actually “exposed to in one day.” I think the number may be higher than what you’ve got listed, but the interesting thing is that it’s actually quite hard to tell. There’s a frequently-quoted bit about the average American seeing “3000 ads a day,” but there’s quite a lot of dispute about the number (see here and here.) What seems sure, though, is that most of us see quite a lot of branded marketing that we don’t even notice.

Thanks for the though-provoking piece!