James McDonald Vicary (April 30, 1915 – November 7, 1977) was an American market researcher who pioneered the concept of subliminal advertising with an experiment in 1957, later determined to have been fraudulent.
In 1962, Vicary finally admitted that his subliminal "experiment" had been concocted as a gimmick to attract customers to his failing marketing business.
Born in Detroit, and trained at the University of Michigan (A.B 1940), he pioneered the use of eye-blink analysis to obtain clues about subjects' levels of emotional tension when exposed to various stimuli.
In it, he claimed that an experiment in which moviegoers were repeatedly shown 1/3000-second advertisements for Coca-Cola and popcorn significantly increased product sales.
One of the most commonly known examples of subliminal messaging is Vicary's claimed movie theater experiment in 1957, purportedly in Fort Lee, New Jersey.