I’ve been fascinated with subliminal advertising since I was fairly young. The stuff they do to try to hock one vial of snake oil or another is amazing.
Usually, the stuff goes over my head; the “Sex” that seems to get thrown into every single ice cube or wisp of smoke just goes right by (or does it? — that’s another show).
I was watching a show on ABC last night, and as usual, I was fast-forwarding through the commercials. If this had happened in realtime, I’d probably have missed it, but because I was flicking through quickly, it was pretty jarring, and I went back to look.
It all begins with a wink and a knowing smile.
This is a .MOV file, so you’ll need QuickTime Player to see it. Well worth the effort. The clip is only about 10 seconds long, 600kb.
Let me set the stage.
First, they show a trailer for Argo, a new movie about the Iran hostage crisis, a clear Republican movie plant, as that crisis essentially put Reagan in the White House (and post hoc ergo propter hoc on all that). Then they cut to a very artsy commercial about clothing, which ends in the words “White House” (left) and “Black Market” (right) bifurcating the screen, then they cut to Romney (left) and Obama (right) bifurcating the screen, then cut to the ABC logo.
This by itself was enough to get me to go back and watch it a couple of times, then I decided to grab the clip. As I was editing the clip, I noticed that they slammed the point home a little harder than that.
The whole clothes commercial was far-away, full-body shots of the models in the clothes. But right before this part, they snap for a few frames of a closeup of the model’s face. She winks and smiles at the camera (the screen flashes a couple times, probably what drew my attention in the first place), then it fades to the words (screen flashes a few more times — hey, are you watching!?), *then* it fades to the candidates.
Romney = “White House”
Obama = “Black Market”
Wow. Really?
There is no possibility that this is some accident. No ad exec worth their over-inflated salary would miss something like this. I wonder what nameless, faceless SuperPAC paid to have *those* ads run in *that* order.
Note: ABC is owned by Disney.