Flooring in Brighton, East Sussex, with one of the phone numbers shown. However, there is indeed a business by the name of D.J.

The ad includes no address or other location information.(This can actually be explained rationally, because in some parts of the world the different systems used for landline and mobile phones produced phone numbers with different numbers of digits.) The phone number(s) listed appears odd - 21 digits long or two numbers of differing lengths.The headline of the ad (“LAID BY THE BEST”) is an obvious sexual double entendre.(As the graphic displayed at the bottom of this page indicates, the illustration may have originated with items commonly distributed in bars and restaurants, such as matchbooks or cocktail napkins.)

The subject matter - a woman holding a champagne glass - seemingly has nothing to do with the product or service being advertised, which is flooring.Several clues might suggest that this image was something put together as a joke rather than a genuine Yellow Pages ad: Such is the nature of the putative advertisement from the Yellow Pages (a pre-Internet printed phone directory of business services) 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. 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. 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.

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