Examples of Subliminal Advertising

Visual cues and subliminal messages are in every ad that you see. You can count on several different props being used to induce the consumers, depending on the type of market the advertisers are trying to appeal to. Subliminal messages work because they delve into the subconscious part of your brain, the part of the brain that takes it all in all of the time, then stores the information. Your conscious mind bases the visual input on logic, so if a subliminal message is used properly, it bypasses the conscious and goes directly to the subconscious and can be almost hypnotic.

Sometimes, these visuals are not subtle, other times, you don't even realize what it is your watching. For example, if there is an ad for a shampoo, they don't typically use women with thin hair or no hair at all. They use women who are young, have long and strong, shiny and beautiful hair, to make you think that this company's shampoo is what caused her hair to look like that. Would you be more willing to purchase a shampoo if the ad had a bald lady? Probably not. So, in cases like that, the subliminal message isn't very subtle; it says "buy our product and your hair will look amazing, like this girl's."

Some that are a little more subtle would be, perhaps, car commercials. Many car commercials try to show the point of view as if you were driving that car. It puts you in position to try to understand what it would feel like to be behind the wheel of their amazing product. Another form that is more subtle is a TV ad. In TV ads, they rely on repetition. They put the text logo on the screen for just a second, and many times your conscious mind may not have had time to absorb the impact it had, but it's likely that your subconscious mind did.

So let's give some examples. Most subliminal messages out there seem to deal with sex in one way or another, whether with a phallic symbol or a representation of something that it's not necessarily supposed to be.

Other messages are a little more discreet. For example,the movie poster from Silence of the Lambs; if you look closely, you'll see that the moth's head is a skull (that's a little more obvious. If you can get an extreme close-up, you'll notice that the skull is made up of figures of women).

So as you might be able to see from these images, subliminal messages are everywhere. They're in the ads you see for McDonalds and all sorts of different beverages (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic). They're in everything you see, both online and on TV. It's hard to avoid and sometimes works really well, when done properly. It makes a big impact on those that see the ads.