Blipvert

In the 1985 film "Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future" and the subsequent 1987 science fiction television show "Max Headroom", blipverts were a new high-speed, high-intensity television commercial which caused the nervous systems of certain viewers to overload. Blipvert is a portmanteau of the onomatopoeia "blip", a brief sound, and "advert", the British abbreviation for "advertisement". In the original story, reporter Edison Carter exposed Network 23's efforts to create and broadcast them in his investigative affairs segment, "What I Wanna Know".

Real-life examples

Master Lock, which had already made the image of a padlock shot by a sharpshooter into a lasting advertising image with their ad in the Super Bowl in 1974, incorporated that video image, along with its logo, in a one-second-long television commercial in 1998. [Time, [http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,988820,00.html http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,988820,00.html "Blink Of An Ad"] "Time.com" Retrieved on 04-24-07 ] It is not believed to have caused anyone to experience negative effects.Fact|date=March 2008

In May 2006, GE introduced "One Second Theater," television commercials with additional material included as individual frames in the last second of the ad, for frame-by-frame viewing with digital video recorders. When viewed at normal speed, the frames flash by rapidly, not unlike blipverts. In a press release, GE described "One Second Theater" as "harkening back to the days of Ronald Reagan and "GE Theater"." [GE, [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2006_May_8/ai_n26853739 "Introducing GE's 'One Second Theater'; A Whole New World of Creative Content"] (press release), May 8, 2006, accessed October 5, 2008]

E-mail blipverts

In September 2006, term blipvert was used by security researcher Richi Jennings [ [http://richi.co.uk/blog/2006/09/new-spammer-tactic-blipverts.html Richi Jennings: New Spammer Tactic: Blipverts: Stuff 'n' nonsense about email, spam, travel, and life in the UK ] ] to describe new kind of image-based spam email with animated GIF pictures showing subliminal "BUY BUY BUY" messages for very short period of time (10-40 ms).

Joost

The peer-to-peer TV network Joost also calls one sort of advertising "blipverts".

References

External Links

[http://www.ge.com/onesecondtheater/ GE One Second Theater]