All the way since the early 1980's and even much earlier there was, at least in many parts of the world, this widespread notion that some movie producers had at least considered inserting a form of subliminal advertising into the movie reels that they were sending to movie theaters, in the form of showing an advertisement picture (eg. for a brand of soda, or whatever) during one frame of the movie, eg. every 24 frames, ie once per second.
The widely believed claim was that since the picture was only shown for one single frame, it would go too fast for anybody to consciously notice, but the subconscious would notice it, especially since it was shown repeatedly once per second during the entire movie, and thus it would create a subconscious craving for that particular product in the viewers.
This notion was so widely believed that, in fact, many countries outright passed laws banning this from being done.
The funny thing is that many people believed that claim, ie, that you wouldn't notice the advertisement picture if it was shown for one single frame, without ever having tested it. This factoid was just repeated over and over and over. I, in fact, heard the factoid from my primary school teacher, who just repeated it seriously, without criticism or doubt. In fact, many people to this day, in 2024, still believe it.
This is particularly funny because of how obviously false it is. Just try it: Create a video at a framerate of 24 frames per second (which was, and still is, the standard framerate for movie theater films), and put a static picture that has nothing to do with the rest of the video each 24th frame, and then play it at that speed: The picture flashing once per second will be extremely obvious. Completely impossible to miss. Even if you show the video to someone who has no idea what's going on will clearly see it.
Even if you don't actually replace the entire frame of the original video with the ad picture, but instead embed the ad (for example, say, the Coca Cola logo) into the original frame, like putting it in a corner with a transparent background, you will still very clearly see it flashing every second (or whatever interval you used). You'll likely even be able to read what it says.
1/24th of a second is not even nearly fast enough for you not to notice it. Neither is 1/30th of a second used in NTSC (and most online videos eg. on YouTube). Not even 1/60th of a second, if you were to create a 60-fps video, would be enough. It might be less obvious and you might be less able to read what it says, but the flashing would still be quite noticeable.
That original myth was just repeated blindly, and people just believed it, without ever raising any doubts or ever actually testing it.
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