While attending the ARISE Arts Conference, I sat in on a session called Attack of the Never-Ending Brainstorms by Tony Biaggne. It was an entertaining and enlightening session discussing idea generation for churches (I volunteer on a creative team at Liberty Church in Broken Arrow, OK).

Tony used this Derren Brown video clip as an example:

After viewing the video, two questions come to mind:

1) How can I be better at embedding messages superfluously? I tend to stop promoting a message at the point of adequacy. As Derren shows, there is a level of subliminal saturation to reach in order to be truly persuasive.

2) How many of my decisions are driven by these subliminal messages, instead of being driven by my core beliefs and values? Great! Now I’m even questioning whether eating at Pei Wei last night was my idea or a string of subconscious prompts (probably both in reality).

There is a rule of thumb that people must see your message 5-7 times before they’ll act on it. As with any rule of thumb, there are exceptions. (An incredibly powerful or creative message may be a catalyst at first impression. A boring, uninspired message may never break through.)

But, what if the message is packaged differently each time, or you repeatedly expose people to different elements of the same message – as Derren Brown did?

Maybe the whole isn’t always greater than the sum of its parts.