hey i like sex as much as the next guy-in other words, a lot-- but between this and half of crispin's work with the young guns and virgin stuff the past year or so, and half the tnries this week about naked mannequins and naked this and naked that and even doves 'real women' in their undies campaign,
I have to ask myself

is advertising just regressing to the old "sex sells" standby? have we collectively given up? are we not 'getting any,' so we're acting out these fantasies?

is this a big deal, not a big deal,a passing phase or what? I guess I can't decide.

Maybe it's because I'm too busy touching myself.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

This is really lame.

Not that it can be seen so much as I had to size the image down, but on the first table on the right, the bills are $1 but in the "axed" version those become $100s. Does that mean the diner food becomes that much more expensive? ;)

I'd love to see one of the brands in this category go in another direction...they all seem so "samey".

They tried to make the applicator look as phallic as possible huh?

Umm....

Forgive me if I sound like a tin foil hat wearing lunatic, but you may want to study this ad again. It is loaded with subliminal artwork. Actually I will refer to it as psychoactivly rendered artwork instead.WTF am I talking about you ask?

Well for starters look at the "After" photo. The most obvious detail is the neon sign...it now says "Hot Love" instead of "Hot food Clovers" as in the before photo.

Next I will direct your attention to the sign above the blond waitress at the counter. Before: "Dessert Special--Warm Bundt Cakes" After: "Dessert Special-Warm Buns"

OK now we get into the weird stuff which is going to sound nuts but here goes: If you take a gander at the last booth on the end in the before photo: you see a couple sitting there just talking, now take a look at the after photo, on first glance it would seem that the legs up in the air would be an indication of the wild times going on now that the "Axe effect" has taken place, however if you look at the legs from a comfortable distance the lower leg has actually been re-touched to look like a erect dick. OK laugh all you want but it's there.

Now take a look at the gentlemen seated at the counter in the before picture, he is studying the menu to decide what he wants. Take a look at the after picture now, the menu is on the counter but what does he have in his hands? Well if you look closely I think you will see that it is a dick. What else could it be?

Yes the $100 tip on the table is interesting. In the before photo it was a lousy tip and a half eaten burger. In the after photo it is a different meal altogather like a dessert. And note also that the napkin in both photos is cloth, whereas everyone else has paper. There are more examples, but I will let you find them and draw your own conclusions.

I can't wait to hear the inevitable howls that "Subliminal ads don't work" and "Wilson Key was a crackpot".

It does work. This ad appeared in Playboy in both the Nov and Dec issues. I checked at playboy.com on their ad rates. Just a 4 color 1 page ad alone runs in the neighborhood of $147,000.00. This was 4 pages. One of which was blank! Now assuming that they got a discount on the blank page (Seeing that it was no color) that's at least $441,000.00 for the 3 content pages alone!

Wake up people.

It's hardly subliminal...it's intentional. Heck, it's the concept of the ad! When you lift the flap where the first image of the diner is, it "opens" the cap on the product, causing what is shown in the second image.

Wilson Key was a crackpot! ;)

Get with the times, these days it's all about Joseph Turow and stealthy virals. haha!

ps -
Subliminal Advertising? from Adcult USA and Ogilvy on Advertising

Vicary's lucrative franchise for selling American's paranoia back to them was picked up by a Canadian sociologist, Wilson Bryan Key. What separates Key from Vicary is that Key, a one-time professor, is sincere. He looks at ads and sees fuck written all over crackers, vaginas on the forearms of little children, and penises in the pictures of ice cubes. He really be lives that every day we are bombarded with a flood of images ( not just words, as Vicary believed ) to make us drink, smoke, and party in ways we never would normally.
Starting with Subliminal seduction in the 1970's, Key has churned out five books, all with the same thesis; advertising agencies secretly embed "sublime" in images in such a way as to make us so insecure that we will buy the product to find surcease. How do you spell relief? According to Key: p-u-r-c-h-a-s-e. I don't want to belabor his argument, but suffice it to say that any object longer than it is wide is a penis. Everything else is a vagina. Although Key has lost his tenure at a Canadian university, in part of his scholarly craziness, it makes no difference. He has earned more than Vicary plying his trade.

OK but I all I was saying is that there was more to the ad than what meets the eye. I got the overt intentions of the second page (the

Thanks for the link, and I have also read that quote before.

It's interesting that virtually the same exact counter arguement(s) are always brought into the mix when "Subliminals" are discussed.

So I guess it never happened in the history of advertising.

Thanks for clearing that up for me! ;-)