Ice cubes in ads, for example, are completely the work of retouching artists, since real ice cubes would melt under the hot lights of the photographer’s studio. Much photography for advertising art is sent to professional retouching studios, where artists set to work correcting photographic imperfections and adding visual effects not captured by the camera. “But to people who have worked in ad agencies, there would seem to be a simpler explanation. He concluded that such `hidden persuaders’ were carefully contrived by major advertisers and their agencies to seduce consumers at a subliminal level. “ Subliminal Seduction … Key …offered numerous examples of sexual symbols, four-letter words, and pornographic pictures buried in the otherwise bland content of various ads. In your recent column on Wilson Bryan Key and Subliminal Seduction, you stated that Key “doesn’t have sex embedded in his pictures, he’s got sex embedded in the brain.” Before dismissing Key as a crackpot, take a look at the attached article from Consumer Behavior: Concepts and Strategies (1978) by Berkman and Gilsen: This guy doesn’t have sex embedded in his pictures, he’s got sex embedded in the brain. This is a guy who also claims that every Ritz cracker has the word “sex” embedded on it 12 times on each side that on April 21, 1986, Time magazine published a picture of Moammar Gadhafi with the word “kill” embedded on the face and that once at a Howard Johnson’s he felt compelled to order fried clams, even though he hates fried clams, because (he later discovered) the place mat had a picture of fried clams containing subliminal images of an orgy including oral sex and bestiality with a donkey. And how is a man’s face (or, for that matter, a scolding woman or a henpecked husband) supposed to seduce you into buying something? I don’t know, and as far as I can tell neither does Key, but his view seems to be that if it’s in there, it’s in there for a reason. Why go to all the trouble of putting in something that no reader could recognize without special instruments? Because, Key says, your subconscious brain doesn’t need special instruments. Through some miracle of photography, the face had been superimposed on top of the image of the man with the erect penis. “I guess it’s my word against theirs,” he told the students cheerfully.Īlso in the martini photograph, Key claimed, there was an image of a man’s face that could be discerned only with an “anamorphoscope,” a mirrored cylinder that works sort of like a fun-house mirror. He immediately concluded that his own publisher was part of the subliminal seduction conspiracy. The apparent image of the man with the erect penis was just happenstance, the equivalent of seeing a face in the clouds.Īt this point a rational person might have said to himself, boy, I’ve been on this job too long. The publisher informed him they hadn’t taken the photo from an advertisement, they’d merely had a photographer set a martini on a table and take a picture of it, without bothering to stick in any subliminal stuff. Naturally he was consumed with guilt, since the publisher was using (perhaps inadvertently) the same sleazy techniques to seduce people into buying the book that Key himself was condemning in others. Key went on to tell the students he first saw this photo on the cover of the paperback version of one of his own books with the headline, “Are You Being Sexually Aroused by This Picture?” At first he assumed the publisher had taken the photo from an ad. Maybe there’s something to this after all. (All I see in the upper left is something that looks vaguely like a face, and I can’t make out the alleged husband at all.) Aha, you think. In the middle there was a man with an erect penis, in the upper left a woman scolding the man for drinking, and in the lower right another man, who Key somehow determined was the woman’s henpecked husband.Ĭreed thoughtfully includes the suspect photo with his article, and by jiminy it looks like there is a man with an erect penis in the middle. Psychologist Tom Creed reports attending a college lecture in 1986 in which Key described in detail the subliminal images he’d found in a picture of a martini. Revealing testimony on this score comes to us from the Skeptical Inquirer, one of the nation’s leading antifruitcake journals. I won’t claim no eager beaver account executive ever slipped a subliminal message into an ad, Jayzie, but Wilson Bryan Key is the kind of guy who could find something suggestive in a dial tone.
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