Category: Subliminal Advertising

More horticultuture

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Here’s another print ad from over fifty years ago, November 11, 1961. It appeared in the program of a New York City area pro football game.

The shade of red — and even the sheen — of the woman’s lips matches both the Coke cup and the logo.

The chrysanthemum actually has been cut (as with an exacto knife) from a photo and then physically pasted in the painting. The supraliminal stimulus of the flower has the subliminal effect of making an accomplice of the unconscious of the viewer in the product’s promotion. There’s also a similarity to the more current use of hypnotic spirals.

Say it with flowers?

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Like it was yesterday, I can remember the professor’s remark in Psych 101 when we started on Psychoanalysis: “After you’ve studied Freud, when someone says it with flowers, you’ll know exactly what it is that they’re trying to say.”

Do note on what the man has his hands. Since the woman is blushing, his viewing the orchid has engendered embarrassment. For him, seeing the flower is very exciting; he’s staring and his jaw’s dropped.

This advertising image uses a supraliminal stimulus with a subliminal response. The orchid and the box are clearly accessible to the conscious mind. The unconscious equates the flower and case with sexual anatomy. The next step progresses from Psychoanalysis to Pavlovian conditioning. The unconscious’s charged understanding of the setting — essentially getting to third base — is associated with the brand’s tobacco concoction.

This ad appeared on the back cover of the 1942 Sporting News Official Baseball Record Book.

Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key

Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key
This is one of the most important books ever published! And of course that means nothing in these days when the jacket of every penny dreadful is tattooed with blurbs that would make the author’s mother blush. But here it is true; if between the covers there was nothing but the introduction by Marshall McLuhan — if all the other pages were blank — this would still be something that everyone should read.
(BTW, McLuhan’s “pattern recognition” IBM aphorism went on to be echoed by Gibson.)

As now all the world’s a stage for Marketing — a president one day playing pilot and the next Western sheriff, hocus-pocus WMDs, the peace candidate president that follows rendering the Mediterranean Mare NATO, global warming the apocalypse now and we’re told to focus on gay marriage — the only stray glimmer of hope is in raising the subliminal out of the unconscious. That’s what Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key can do for you.