More Subliminal Advertisement.

Sometime not too long ago, I wrote an article about subliminal messages in advertisements using Folgers, an american brand of coffee to illustrate how sex can get injected in a commercial. That commercial was made during the 60's.

A few nights ago, I was cruising down EDSA and saw this really striking ad for a very popular product: Coca-cola. Location for the ad is between Guadalupe and Buendia MRT stations. It's at least 30 ft tall so you can't miss it. The theme was "Buhay Coke, Buksan mo." (The Coke Life, Open it.) There is nothing wrong with the caption.

Then I saw the image posted in the billboard. It's a coke being opened after being shaken, its contents exploding from it's uncapped mouth. There was nothing noteworthy about that, I mean, that's what happens when coke is opened under pressure.

What was striking was that the "fountain" of coke together with the bottle formed something I found really funny. To further illustrate my point, I have a picture here of what you should see along EDSA:

(Recreated drawing masterfully done by Leonardi Da Vinci using MSPaint, 300 years after his death. Go blame him for the sucky art.)

It looked like a vagina between two legs spreading. Even the taxi driver agreed after I mentioned it. A friend of mine thought so too. And then there's the word "Buksan mo" which made it even funnier, in a not-so-good suggestive way.

If you don't believe me, go check it out. We have a 50ft vagina posted in our most busy thoroughfare and nobody even notices the play there. (Talk about underappreciation.)

What is it with advertisers and trying to hide sex symbols in ads anyway? If it's not hotdog commercials, it's ice cream. If it's not ice cream it's condominiums. And now this.

Maybe somewhere inside the bowels of the great Coke organization (no pun intended) a conversation like this occured:

marketing guy: Betcha I can put a large drawing of a pussy in a very busy roadway and get away with it.
marketing head: How big?
marketing guy: 50ft. This one's for the books. It'll be like Poontang-Palooza.
marketing head: Do it and I'll let you do Bench commercials and you get to choose the models.

Is there a yearly award for the "most publicized hidden sex icon" in the advertising industry? I begin to suspect that the guys who make these things are just corporate version of my classmate Benson, who got caught vandalizing our school walls with giant images of penis using chalk. I mean, they had to grow up and maybe they just wanted to do as work what they enjoyed doing as kids.

Kudos to Coke for being able to pull this shit off from right under everybody's noses.

Or should I say over our heads?