Advertising is clever, subliminal.
Not really. Most is banal and amateurish. My wife spent her career in advertising, including being on the team for the Anheuser-Busch account (Spuds Mackenzie, the Budweiser frogs, Nights are made for Michelob), Cadillac, the then Southwestern Bell and others.
About that time one of the periodic books with their puffed up claims of subliminal advertising and other nonsense came out and the agency was besieged by people who had discovered all sorts of subliminal cues in their ads. None existed except in the minds of their discovers. Example: One ad featured three women in Budweiser swimsuits on a Budweiser Beach towel. The claim was that the women's hairdos were arranged to have an S, an E and an X spelling sex. If you wanted to find it and were willing to squint your eyes to blur the picture, you could conceivably stretch a point and say you saw it - or any other three letter word you can think of. But the people who put the ad together knew that it was all hogwash, like pretty much all the rest of those claims.
There are very few evil geniuses in the world, but there is an overabundance of the credulous and gullible.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
