Urban Legend: A Yellow Pages ad reveals risqué image

January 9, 2006 D. H. McKee

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True … What’s funny is that Kitchener, ON makes it into a Snopes article. We rule.

Some critics have long maintained that companies and their advertising agencies often employ subliminal advertising to increase sales by concealing words and images (usually of a sexually suggestive nature) in their advertisements. The nature of “subliminal,” of course, means that these alleged hidden persuaders are not obvious to the ordinary viewer and may require intense scrutiny or an unusual approach (such as viewing an image backwards, upside-down, or with a magnifying glass) to discern.
Such is the nature of the putative Yellow Pages ad for a flooring company displayed above, which is accompanied by an illustration of a woman holding a champagne glass that, when flipped upside-down and cropped in half horizontally, resembles an image of a woman with no lower undergarments touching herself in a strategically sensitive area.
Another reader passed along an example of a genuine Yellow Pages ad (for a bar in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada) that makes use of this illustration.
Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (I Am Curious (Yellow Pages))

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As a guy who occasionally curates art shows and wrangles artists together, I often have to edit and post artist bios, profile pictures, and artwork images. This can be a problem, since many artists and writers aren’t used to selling themselves. Artists rarely know how to present their art for display in a brochure, and writers aren’t used to writing about themselves.

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