GE Tries Mind Control

General Electric is known as a deadly serious company with a long line of innovation. They are the ninth largest company in the world, and, based on performance, lay off the bottom 200 of their workforce every year. You don't get to be known as the "inventor of the light bulb" without being serious.

So, it's nice to see that GE is lightening up a little bit as they enter a new field of innovation. (More on that later.) There's a commercial out there for GE's new hybrid locomotive. You know the one: All the turn-of-the-century folks get covered with soot from the old coal-powered locomotives. A funny little commercial. But there's something in the commercial that hints at what GE may be innovating next (and I'm not talking about hybrid locomotives).

Toward the very end of the commercial, before all of the icons for GE's various businesses flash on the screen, there's a flash of something else; something red. It's too quick to see. In fact, you probably didn't even notice. But, if you slow it down, there's about eight frames of something called "One Second Theatre." (Film moves at 24 frames per second, so you have some sort of idea how fast this flies by.) It's a clever vignette about what happened to all the folks in the commercial. If you can't see it, there's even a website you can go to to see this little thing. But, I'm not going to give you the web address, because, if you've seen the commercial, you already know it; you may not think you know it, but you do. Yep, that's right: GE has gotten into subliminal advertising.

Ever watched a airplane engine commercial and suddenly felt the need to watch NBC? Or seen a commercial for an open MRI and wanted to buy lightbulbs? Probably not, but if GE is willing to subliminally sneak dumb shit into their commercials, imagine what they would do if they really wanted to sell you something. You don't get that big without being able to control peoples' minds a little bit.