Are subliminal messages secretly embedded in advertisements?
June 26, 1987
Dear Cecil:
I recently came across a book by researcher Wilson Bryan Key in which he claims to find subliminal images of sex, death, and the occult stuck into photos in print advertisements. They range from screaming skulls airbrushed into ice cubes to an orgy depicted in a plate of fried clams. My major impression is that Key is a crackpot (he can find the letters S-E-X spelled out anywhere there are squiggly lines), but some of his findings seem a little too real to be coincidental. What's the truth, Cecil? Do advertisers really hide these images (while denying all, of course), or does Key just have an active imagination?
writch's note: I was employed as a worker in a drive-in theater as a youth, and I spent a lot of time up in the booth with the projectionist.
Regardless of whether: "Cecil's aim was to discredit the notion that there is some organized conspiracy to seduce the public through subliminal techniques."
I know the guy who spliced the pictures of popcorn into the movies to make the people buy stuff.
I know they made this stuff (subliminal messages) illegal shortly before I was hired.
The idea that the people who formerly made their livings doing this *stopping* what they were doing and taking up other lines of work doesn't seem as likely as they just found other ways to put the subliminal messages in.
Now, I was lucky in that I knew in advance that the 'conspiracy' exists, since I worked with one of the 'conspirators'. So, when I went off to college, though a lot of the more 'intellectual' folks (pseudo-intellectuals, like Cecil) took the incredulous stance and started using the 'conspiracy' defense, I was able to tell them in no uncertain terms that I knew that there was, in fact, a 'conspiracy'.
If I'd been a few years older, I might likely have been trained in how to splice the subliminal implants into the films, too.
Now, the funniest part is that since 'we all know' that this is BS (and likely to get you a tinfoil hat award), they could actually go back to putting it in the media streams, and nobody would believe it was happening (again).
Since, of course, we are all too grown up to think that people would do stuff like that, right?
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