Press the red button if you are colour blind or leave a message after the beep if you have a hearing impairment

Social consciousness is nowadays a very important factor in all projects involving the public, this is very responsible, and I wouldn't challenge it by no means. When first confronted by the subject of Subliminal Messages Masked, I was a bit curious about the whole subject, later I wrote down a few possible issues concerning impairments and limits to reaching the audience suffering from impairments.

It is quite obvious that a blind person, fully or partially will be difficult to reach by a masked subliminal message in a frame of a video, and the same for a person with hearing difficulties, but there are other more common occurrences that can put these methods to the test:

-Some people are colour blind-

So the colour suggestion methods (even the ones in traditional graphic design) will find obstacles in passing the messages.

-Some people cannot read-

So a frame with a message in the written form will again hit the wall, at least until somebody can prove that some super function of the brain can decipher the message even if the conscious brain cannot decode it into speech. Yes very far fetched...

-Some people are less receptive-

Work this one out yourself, a clue? OK hypnosis...

-----------------------------------

At this point, very lightly, please note that I will not develop this into depth, I dare to say that all methods individually and even combined can fail to influence sectors of the audience. Some of these pointers undermine my own theories if taken at face value.

I could defend my theories with the usual statistics, demonstrating that these cases are isolated and represent a minority of the audience... and note that minority in a global society is a very dangerous word. The thing comes to the fact that all minorities together represent a sector of isolated cases that might amount to a large number of small groups quite impossible to fit in a general category. Still, all the audience matters, never overlook this.

There is more than one way to tackle these kind of hindrances, first I never said I would use one method alone to a particular campaign. Second, my methods are based on universal trends and facts, but I never said that I could pass them to someone else just like that, and that that individual could use them as easily as myself. Don't take me wrongly, they would benefit any project greatly, but these things take time to master, and never are a fast fix.

I can reach well over 85% of any audience in any geographical area, any demographic diversity status. Not just by using my clever tools, but more common methods too, that involve hard work, such as stats, ground tests(my own) and many others(not everything taught at university is to be discarded before being developed...). The thing is that I do not use my tools instead of any logical method, I use them on top of any logical procedures I decide to use.

At this stage I am pointing out that the mixture and integration of methods is as important as the individual quality of each one of them. By now I do have formulas of which ones I should use for each particular case and why. But this is where the giveaway stops, I will politely close the door and explain that more than a trade - This is a craft.