On The Media

Subliminal Seduction was a neat little book with very clever tricks.

It's not so easy to say if it was just "pattern recognition" or an advertising artist inserting suggestive images intentionaly or even as just a prank but I have seen a handfull of cigarette and alcohol ads in magazines and on billboards over the years with some very, shall we say, interesting artwork.

Never once did it cause me to run out and buy the product though.

PS check out that Disarrono TV ad running on SPIKE & FX. Nothing subliminal there!

PSS. Surprised Bob did not mention the RATS ad of 2000, maybe it's too much "Swift Boat on the mind" this week. ;)

The Marlboro ad campaign may have been surpassed for most successful psychological operation in history, by the events and media spin of 9/11/2001. The media scenario that day deeply imprinted the concept and fear of terrorism in American minds, and set the stage for two wars, trillions of dollars of war profiteering, and willing surrender of constitutional rights. But the media portrayal may have deceived us, as the Marlboro ads did. The terrorists may have been as fabricated a figment as the Marlboro man was. Watch the video engineering analysis of the World Trade collapses http://www.ae911truth.org to start assembling the puzzle pieces.

Listening to this piece, two niggling instances of seemingly subliminal advertising came to mind:

1) In a recent LA Weekly profile of former Devo frontman and current film and commercial music composer Mark Mothersbaugh (several Wes Anderson films as well as the popular Mac commercials), Randall Roberts quotes Mothersbaugh discussing inserting subversive subliminal messages into commercial jingles:

"At first, he had an uneasy relationship with commercial spots, unsure how to approach the notion of manipulating strangers into buying products that he didn’t feel particularly excited about. As an antidote, he and fellow Devo member Bob Casale in the beginning used to sneak subliminal messages into their scores. The first few times they were nervous, says Mothersbaugh. “I think it was a Keds commercial where we put in ‘Question authority.’ I remember the people from Keds were tapping their pens on the table and the music’s playing, and it gets to the subliminal message, and I remember I flushed bright red. I looked over at this guy and he’s going, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Go go go!’”

2) I was also reminded of comic Norm MacDonald on Joe Camel's appearance: "This is what I've noticed. He doesn't even look like a fucking camel. He looks so much like a cock, because you know how it's usually subliminal, where you have to find the cock? Right? This character, you have to find the goddamn camel! "

In college in 1976 a friend was taking a media studies course covering this very topic - subliminal images in print media. The professor show many very distinct pieces and had the class look for and collect examples for the course. This friend and I collected a dozen or so pictures mostly from liquor ads in magazines of the time. Yes, some of those shown required some real imagination to see the word 'sex' in the ice cubes. But the pictures we found left no doubt that these images of long curvy women in the necks of wine and liquor bottles were meant to be there.

One evening in the break room of the grocery store (my college job) we found 3 ads in one magazine. The store manager figured we were just gullible "kids" believing an old nutty professor. We showed him the ads and pointed out the images. All he could say was "damn, they really are there!"

If you do a bit of poking you will find that along with emerging organizations like M.A.D.D., and other vocal media groups at the time that did not like this kind of advertising, were responsible for limiting the placement of liquor ads in every magazine under the sun.