ABSTRACT
There are those who believe that advertising is all powerful and that the mechanism of advertising must be unconscious and subliminal and this is why its effects are not open to introspection. This chapter asserts that subtlety, not subliminality, is what is important and at the same time dispels the subliminal advertising myth. It examines the reasons why 'embeds' which fan people's fears continue to appear in advertising from time to time. Anxiety increases even more when the subliminal image is found in political communications such as happened when George W. Bush was running against Al Gore for the US presidency. The notion of subliminal advertising was based on the belief that awareness was an all-or-nothing thing. The concept of subliminal advertising was based on the notion of a threshold. Subliminal meant 'below the limen, or threshold'. Divided listening experiments at first glance seem akin to a slow form of torture.
