Forbidden from plastering the car with the Marlboro logo, the brand opted to stamp a rather peculiar barcode on Ferrari's racing cars. At first glance, this may look like an odd decision, but the barcode bore more than a passing resemblance to the Marlboro logo when flashing past F1 spectators at home and on the track.
A glistening Coke bottle surrounded by ice and sporting the tagline 'Feel the curves' Launched in the mid 80s in south Australia, the more suggestive elements of the image went unnoticed for a number of years. It was eventually spotted by a driver stuck behind a lorry sporting the ad. The driver noticed that one ice cube appeared to hide the image of a woman performing a sex act. After its discovery, Coca-Cola, apparently oblivious to this visual allusion, promptly scrapped the advert and launched a complaint against the artist, who soon after lost his job.
Below is an advert found for a flooring company in the Yellow Pages, with the tagline 'Laid by the best'. While this could be read as innocent or a brazen double entendre, there is little doubt of the advertiser's intention when the image is rotating degrees.
The UK science fiction magazine SFX has become well known for partly covering up its title lettering, so at first and second, and third glance you would be forgiven for thinking the magazine consisted of racier content. The effect often seems to coincide with a beautiful actress appearing with the cover. BONUS : Disney's Lion King was also put into the spotlight as a freeze frame moment showed what appeared to be dust forming the word SEX , but now the widley accepted opinion is that it actually spells SFX, and was added as an easter egg by the SFX team, though nothing has ever been confirmed.
One would expect to see the late US president George Washington in many places, from statues, to town names, on the side of a mountain, and on a dollar bill, but not on a dollar bill sneakily placed within the lettuce of a chicken burger, which is where he was sighted in in a KFC ad. But on both sides of the Atlantic, his announcement sparked fear and outrage.
His story took a more serious blow when the manager of the cinema involved told Motion Picture Daily that the experiment had had no impact.
In , Vicary finally confessed that he hadn't done enough research to go public and that he regretted the whole thing. But a nagging anxiety about the supposed power of subliminal advertising has never gone away.
Ever since the panic, it has been banned in the UK. So is all this anything more than a hangover from sci-fi-style Cold War worries about mass brainwashing? Psychologists have long agreed that flashing words too quickly for the conscious mind to register can have some limited effects in the lab.
And at the University of Utrecht in , a team of experimental social psychologists, Johan Karremans, Jasper Claus and Wolfgang Stroebe, did manage to make subliminal advertising itself work - in strict laboratory conditions, provided a series of limiting factors are in place. Their work suggested that subliminal advertising was only effective with products that people knew of and somewhat liked.
The flashes made the brand name more '"cognitively accessible", their theory went, so it wouldn't work with very high-profile brands - you couldn't make a brand like Coca-Cola much more familiar to people than it already is.
They replicated their results, and published their findings in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. But the crucial question, raised by Vicary's dubious claims, and never finally settled, is this - can you take all this out of the lab, beyond its strict controls, and reproduce it in the messiness of real life, on a mass scale?
No-one, apparently, has attempted this since the s. So, as part of a BBC Radio 4 documentary, we decided to carry out a public test. Working under the guidance of Stroebe, I devised an experiment in which 98 participants volunteered to take part.
Stroebe and his colleagues' research suggested that if you knew subliminal advertising is at work, it was ineffective, so it was only afterwards that what was being tested was revealed. Also, the Dutch research indicated that advertising a specific drink brand with subliminal flashes was only effective if the audience actually wanted a drink.
So it had to be a brand that was perceived as thirst-quenching. So a pre-test survey was conducted to find a drink brand that might work. As with Stroebe's pre-test, the responses suggested that Lipton Iced Tea fitted the bill.
When the volunteers arrived, they were given crisps in an attempt to make them thirsty. A phallic pattern in the abdominal muscles.
Can you spot the nude female torso at 6 seconds in? The original ad is on the left, subliminal parts are highlighted on the right. Linking the brand with masculinity. A hidden dollar in this KFC sandwich links it to power and wealth. A McDonald's ad appeared for one frame in the middle of Iron Chef, but it was supposedly a glitch. Flip the image to see that sex helps sell.
A suggestive Burger King ad. Almost a parody of subliminal advertising -- loading the commercial with suggestions and barely showing the product. The truth behind the Dodge logo? Family Guy made fun of subliminal advertising. Want to see more unusual advertisements? Loading Something is loading. Email address. Deal icon An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt.
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