James Vicary is a market researcher best known for pioneering the notion of subliminal advertising in 1957. He claimed that an experiment in which moviegoers were repeatedly shown 0.03-second advertisements for Coca-Cola and popcorn significantly increased their sales. In 1962, Vicary admitted that the original study was fabricated. Wikipedia
The definitive Wikipedia entry for James Vicary. Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Vicary