NY Times Photo Depicts The Fall of Advertising, The Rise of PR
Did anyone else catch this (screenshot) in today’s New York Times? The photo for an article (appropriately) titled “Web Fight: Blocking Ads and Adding Art” contained what I perceived to be two subliminal messages. Keep in mind this is an article about a guy trying to block advertisements. Essentially, TiVo to TV commercials is this guy to online ads.
The first, and strongest, subliminal message is that the guy featured (again, in an article about ad-blocking) has a copy of PRWeek magazine on his shelf. How funny is that?! Maybe I am the only one to find humor in this, but given the long fought PR vs. advertising debate I think this is a nice subtle jab in an already anti-advertising article. The second not-so-subliminal-just-really-hard-to-read message is the sticker he has on his Mac computer pointing to the Apple icon and reading “you don’t need it.”
Even more eerie is the fact that I found this only days after posting a fascinating video about subliminal advertising.
