Subliminal Seduction

   On the very long list of things I have to do, which is shorter than the list of things I am supposed to be doing, you would not find the words "subliminal seduction." I did see them in a recent publication and thought I should connect them to a time and place and put them in a context about which you may have forgotten, or be far too young to remember. While I would like to take the time to consider subliminal seduction in relation to such current concerns as -  fake news, alternate reality, disinformation, media manipulation, post-truth, truthiness and our current epistemic crisis - I will just pause long enough to relate them to UWO (Western University) and events 48 years ago. 

   Since I am not supposed to be doing this, I will simply provide the basics, which can be used by a journalist or reporter who can get paid to put them all together with more details and coherence. I will begin with the catalyst and conclude with something I wrote back in 2008, which is highly relevant.

   The title that attracted my attention: "The Cold War Panic Over Hidden Messages in Ads,". It was written by Lisa Borst and is found in BOOKFORUM, June/July/August, 2021. Here is the beginning, along with a few snippets:

“AT THIS POINT, you probably should take several deep breaths in order to relax, there is much more to come, if you’ll pardon the expression,” cautions Wilson Bryan Key, in the first chapter of his 1973 pulp best-seller Subliminal Seduction. The book, which ignited one of the Cold War era’s more banal panics—that the advertising industry is a black site of veiled salacious messages—is best remembered for its analysis of an ad for Gilbey’s gin, which Key claimed contained the letters S-E-X embedded in ice cubes...According to Key’s four basically interchangeable books, most of mass media is an orgy if you look closely. Using a kind of horny hermeneutics of suspicion, Key rifled through the byproducts of postwar consumerism and found taboo-breaking everywhere...

   Is there any truth to the subliminal myth? Key’s analysis is buoyed by some boilerplate Freud that’s pretty convincing—seductive, even—including a fun reading of castration anxiety evident on late-’60s Playboy covers. But there is the old project of finding the latent in the manifest, and then there is missing the forest for the trees because every tree sort of looks like a penis. Key’s books offer a cautionary tale for demystification: in attempting to articulate certain undeniable realities—that sex and its contingent fantasies can be spectacularly profitable; that advertising is a destructive financial monoculture on which the media and entertainment industries depend; that every advertisement is essentially a dare, manipulating the viewer in complex psychological ways—they veer toward the truth and blow past it."

Wilson Bryan Key

   If asked in a quiz, "Which professor at UWO would you associate with the word "notoriety?" you would likely have come up with the name of the fellow who appeared on the Geraldo Rivera Show, not Key. Key was in the Journalism Department at Western when he wrote Subliminal Seduction. According to an article in the Western News, the working title at the time was: Rape of the Not So Innocent: Mass Media's Pollution of the Psyche (see Cathy Hawkins, "Sex and Death in Ads: It's What You Don't See That Counts, Mar. 21, 1973.)

   Key was not long at Western and a more enterprising journalist would try to find out why he left. I mention it in my piece from long ago which is provided below. In 1981 in a review of The Clam Plate Orgy... Sandra Martin notes that: "Subsequently, he had a falling out with his colleagues and the university administration which eventually paid Key $64,000 to quit the campus. By that time, however, he was world famous." That is likely to be correct since Ms. Martin is a good reporter and her husband was a faculty member in the History Department (see: "Paperbacks," The Globe and Mail, May 30, 1981.) Key did return to campus in 1980 as a guest of the University Students' Council (see: "Former UWO Journalism Professor and Controversial Writer, Wilson Bryan Key, is Coming to Western on Oct. 9, to Speak About Subliminal Seduction and Media 'Sexploitation'." Western News, Sept. 25, 1980. 

   If you want to read his books, these are found in the Western Libraries: The Age of Manipulation: The Con in Confidence, the Sin in Sincere; The Clam-plate Orgy and other Subliminals The Media Use to Manipulate Your Behavior;  Media Sexploitation, and  Subliminal Seduction: Ad Media’s Manipulation of Not So Innocent America.

   Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders and on the 50th anniversary of its publication, I wrote a piece about it and discussed Key and his association with Western. The connection between Packard and Key is made apparent in the piece.  Those of you interested only in Key's Canadian connection and the subliminal stuff can skip to the parts that are bolded. 

From the Stacks: The Works of Vance Packard

(From: The Bottom Feeder, Jan. 2008. This was a newsletter produced by the staff in the Business Library in an attempt to get students to use the libraries and read books, not just case studies. We probably would have been more successful using something subliminal.)

 

Introduction:

   We descended into the stacks on this occasion because we noticed that many others had observed that it had been 50 years since Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders was published. That book was a non-fiction best seller in 1957 and when we took a look at it, we quickly realized that there is much in it that will be of interest to students of marketing and advertising, as well as to those who follow the broader subject of American Studies. Although we did not have much time for this, we spent enough to know that you should spend more. The Hidden Persuaders alone is worth examining and if you look at Packard's other books (two others of which were best sellers) you will find that he discusses many subjects which are of interest today, including: conspicuous consumption; career concerns; status seeking; planned obsolescence; media manipulation; income inequality and even sex which is of minor interest to at least a few of you. There is even a "Western connection" in that it will briefly lead us to consider "subliminal advertising", which was a subject of some interest here on campus back in the 1970s and which is still a popular one among undergraduates.

   We leave ourselves open to the charge that was sometimes levelled at Packard - that we are being rather superficial and do not fully engage the intellectual issues involved. We will try to avoid it by indicating that our interest here (largely because of time restraints) is bibliographical rather than theoretical. Our major purpose is to point you to the sources and the minor one is to assist you in realizing that extent of the collections held in the Western Libraries. We have all of the material discussed below and we now have even some of the older material in electronic form.

   Back in 1995 when Advertising Age celebrated its 75th anniversary by noting the most important events in advertising history, the publication of The Hidden Persuaders was one of them. Packard indicates clearly what the book is about in the first paragraph:

"This book is an attempt to explore a strange and rather exotic new area of American life. It is about the large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and out thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these efforts take place beneath our levels of awareness; so the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, "hidden". The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives."

   There is much in the book that will be of interest to you and perhaps we can quickly entice you with some chapter titles: "So Ad Men Become Depth Men"; "The Built-in Sexual Overtone"; "Back to the Breast, and Beyond" and "Selling Symbols to Upward Strivers".

There is also a chapter about advertising and children ""The Psycho-Seduction of Children", and there is chapter relating to political advertising that has some resonance given the evidently interminable American campaign, "Politics and the Image Builders". Although in this case Packard is quoting someone else (Richard Rovere), we could not resist sharing it with you:

"Richard Nixon appears to be a politician with an advertising man's approach to his work. Policies are products to be sold to the public - this one today, that one tomorrow, depending on the discounts and the state of the market. He moves from intervention (in Indochina) to anti-intervention with the same ease and lack of anguish with which a copy writer might transfer his loyalties from Camels to Chesterfields".

   Another interesting chapter ".And the Hooks Were Lowered" , deals with "subthreshold effects". In it, Packard is discussing what is now generally referred to as "subliminal advertising" . There was a very real concern at the time that listeners and viewers were potentially being brainwashed by sounds or images which they could not consciously perceive. We will briefly bring up two Canadian connections in this regard.

   The first has to do with an episode involving the CBC. Apparently the CBC did a test where the message "Telephone Now" was flashed 352 times during a 30 minute program to see if viewers responded to this subliminal message. There are accounts that other networks did the same and the use of such techniques was generally banned. We were not able to quickly verify the Canadian episode which is alleged to have occurred around 1958. For a recent account where it is mentioned see: "For a Time in the '50s, A Huckster Fanned Fears of Ad 'Hypnosis', by Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal , Nov.5, 2007 (the huckster was James Vicary).

   The second Canadian example is a very local one that involves this campus in the 1970s. A faculty member in the journalism department, Wilson Bryan Key, published a popular book, Subliminal Seduction, which made controversial contentions about the degree to which the public was being bombarded with sexual images. We have not attempted any archival investigations, nor do we wish to upset any lingering administrators from that period so we will simply quote the following:

"Key relates the details of his original research on subliminal advertising, his colleagues' response to his research, his subsequent (forced?) leaving of University of Western Ontario, their large financial settlement with him, his testimony, before governmental committees, persecution by the advertising industry and commercial media, and numerous instances of when his detractors privately acknowledge the validity of his contentions while publicly discrediting him."

   Key relates those details in The Clam-Plate Orgy: And Other Subliminals the Media Use to Manipulate Your Behavior  We took them from a review by Franklin B.Krohn, in the Journal of Business Ethics , Vol.6, 1987. For an original review of Subliminal Seduction see "Look in the Bottom of the Glass," by Paul Dickson, The Washington Post, Times Herald , Oct. 17, 1973 (believe it or not, we now have the WP in electronic format back to 1877!). The Key/Western episode is discussed briefly in "Don't Bet on It," by Paul Benedetti, The Globe and Mail, March 24, 2007.

   In The Hidden Persuaders, Packard is basically discussing how "professional persuaders" were using the tools of social science and how "motivation researchers" like Ernest Dichter were influencing the field of marketing. To see the influence of this research north of the American border, you need only consult this brief article by Western Business School faculty member Professor David Leighton. He was recently at our library celebration and I wish we had asked him about it: "Putting Motivation Research to Work," Business Quarterly, Vol.23, No.4, Spring, 1958 (even this is available electronically). Additional sources are provided below.

[ A long bibliography of books by and about Packard as well as some obituaries was included, but is not provided below,  and The Bottom Feeder is no longer found on the website of the Western Libraries. It does still exist in the Internet Archive, from which the above was taken. It was done by me and no one in the Western Libraries or at Western University is responsible for the content.]