# subliminal author **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 28, 2001, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089 "2001-07-28T15:52:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![vanilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f19dbf/32.png) [@vanilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vanilla)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2001, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089/1 "2001-07-28T15:52:59Z")
WHat ever happened to Wilson Bryan Key? He had many good books exposing how advertisers put in (and I could see them) subliminal stuff in ads, especially alcohol ads. Has anyone ever found any on their own? I have. ---
**Author:** ![Chas.E](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e99b99/32.png) [@Chas.E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chas.E)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2001, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089/2 "2001-07-28T16:17:42Z")
Found them? Hell, it used to be my job to CREATE them. You really should read “The Clam Plate Orgy” which describes what Key is doing after getting kicked out of academia in a long contentious legal battle. ---
**Author:** ![vanilla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f19dbf/32.png) [@vanilla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vanilla)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2001, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089/3 "2001-07-28T16:21:18Z")
Oh Chas, I have read the Clam Plate Orgy. All 4 of his books, in fact. You actually created them? So its true…Key’s not nuts after all. LOL ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2001, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089/4 "2001-07-28T19:12:28Z")
**Chas.E** , do you have an example of your efforts? ---
**Author:** ![Chas.E](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e99b99/32.png) [@Chas.E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chas.E)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2001, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089/5 "2001-07-28T19:51:02Z")
Hard to remember any specific examples, especially something you’d know, since I haven’t worked in prepress for about the last 8 years. I manipulated stuff like nail polish and wristwatch ads, etc. It was all so boring I can’t even remember them out of all the gazillions of ads I retouched. ---
**Author:** ![Baraqiyal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ecccb3/32.png) [@Baraqiyal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baraqiyal)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2001, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089/6 "2001-07-28T20:19:27Z")
Here’s what Cecil had to say about it: [http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2\_344.html](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_344.html) ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2001, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089/7 "2001-07-29T01:48:26Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Chas.E \* > \*\*Hard to remember any specific examples, especially something you’d know, since I haven’t worked in prepress for about the last 8 years. I manipulated stuff like nail polish and wristwatch ads, etc. It was all so boring I can’t even remember them out of all the gazillions of ads I retouched. > \*\* My experience was quite the contrary. I wrote photo-retouching software in the 1980s and saw thousands of jobs come through our studio, ranging from movie posters, to cigarette and liquor ads. (We did the Budweiser Babes, the Dakota cigarette campaign, Tyson chicken.) No client ever asked for a subliminal image to be inserted in an ad. ---
**Author:** ![Ringo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/779978/32.png) [@Ringo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ringo)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2001, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089/8 "2001-07-29T02:15:24Z")
Treading lightly the ground between what **Pochacco** and **Chas.E** have had to say, I’d guess any big question remaining on the subject is not a query as to whether anybody anywhere ever tried it, but more importantly, is there any evidence it produced any effect (which I doubt)? ---
**Author:** ![Chas.E](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e99b99/32.png) [@Chas.E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chas.E)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2001, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089/9 "2001-07-29T03:02:25Z")
My clients who put in subliminals might have been doing it despite any evidence that it works or not, I think Key’s books may have inspired more subliminal ads than it exposed. It wouldn’t surprise me if the vast majority of subliminal-using clients did not request subliminals to be inserted duing prepress since most clients savvy enough to use them would be savvy enough to insert them on their own. We mostly did stuff like put light patterns of words like “sex” or “fuck” over backgrounds, simple stuff. It’s virtually undetectable. Nothing at the level of complex figures in ice cubes or anything. Most of that stuff comes from the clients’ own studios. Like for example the infamous Disney Little Mermaid album cover. We didn’t do that, but we did retouch it OUT. I have to disagree with the Snopes debunking of that story. We talked to the artist and he said “of COURSE it’s a subliminal embed, we do it all the time.” ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2001, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subliminal-author/74089/10 "2001-07-30T15:05:39Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Chas.E \* > \*\*My clients who put in subliminals might have been doing it despite any evidence that it works or not, I think Key’s books may have inspired more subliminal ads than it exposed. It wouldn’t surprise me if the vast majority of subliminal-using clients did not request subliminals to be inserted duing prepress since most clients savvy enough to use them would be savvy enough to insert them on their own. > \*\* We handled lots of confidential work – pre-release stuff for movies, for example – so I find it hard to believe that we wouldn’t have been trusted to put subliminals in. It’s not like we wouldn’t have done it – we were quite clinical (and cynical) about maximizing the impact of the overt sexual content of many of the ads. Plus, for a short while in the early 1980’s we were the _only_ digital retouching studio in the country. (We used a proprietary, hand-built system that predated commercial systems like Scitex and desktop packages like Photoshop by several years.) At that time it would have been _much_ easier for us to add subliminals than it was for our clients. > [@](#): > > \*\* > We mostly did stuff like put light patterns of words like “sex” or “fuck” over backgrounds, simple stuff. It’s virtually undetectable. Nothing at the level of complex figures in ice cubes or anything. Most of that stuff comes from the clients’ own studios. Like for example the infamous Disney Little Mermaid album cover. We didn’t do that, but we did retouch it OUT. I have to disagree with the Snopes debunking of that story. We talked to the artist and he said “of COURSE it’s a subliminal embed, we do it all the time.” \*\* I’m not disputing that you may have in fact added subliminals to ads. I would argue that it is neither a widespead nor effective practice, and that most cases where people think they are seeing subliminals (including the examples in Kay’s books) they are an artifact of the brain’s tendency to recognize patterns even where there are none (circus animals in the clouds, the face of the Virgin Mary on a tortilla, etc.)