One last point on subliminal advertising... (yeah this is a digress but anyway)... Subliminal stimuli can be considered an induction procedure for an individual behavior change. Nondrug inductions of every kind (i.e. meditation, hypnosis, lucid dream techniques, concentration and memory techniques, progressive relaxation, biofeedback training, etc....) produce variable results on a population sample; typically the results fall along a normal curve wherein some people are strongly affected, some are moderately affected, and some are affected very little if at all. The relevance to advertising is, if a technique can reach perhaps 5% of your readership and then cause 5% of those to alter their behavior favorably toward your product, you've got a quarter of a percent of the market who at least try your product once. In the world of mass marketing, that small number adds up. If you were an ad executive, would you voluntarily give up a tool that can add market share...? Also, the heaviest users of certain categories of products, notably alcohol, are also people who are notoriously suggestible, in the sense that they are already over-reacting to their environment and are using large amounts of alcohol in part to self-medicate against that. Heavy users of any product are usually seeking to fulfill some psychological need, a secondary need which can be manipulated far more easily than can the simpler needs of the average consumers. This increases the effectiveness of any psychologically-loaded selling technique. I believe Key goes overboard in his own writings, but on the other hand I've discovered so many examples of this kind of thing that there's no denying it's going on. Some of these are so blatant I can show the picture to an untrained observer and say "what do you think of this?" and s/he immediately spots the embedded item. On the other hand, these days there are other techniques, some far less subtle; for instance, the ads (particularly billboards) for beverages which show them spurting ejaculatorily from very phallic bottles... advertisers use anything which works, and that leaves a whole lot to choose from. anyway, back to our regular channel... -gg