So I wanted to talk to you guys about subliminal advertising by Subway that has always intrigued me. Not only because it was odd, but because there’s no record of it anywhere today.

In 1998/99 there was a TV advertisement by Subway called “A Message from Subway Subliminal”. In that opening title was a play on the word, “subliminal” where the “sub” was coloured the same as the “sub” in the Subway logo. Get it? Clever.

Now within that commercial there were the usual featured things like scenes of lettuce falling on bread and carrots being chopped etc, and between these scenes was a very obvious, one-second cut of not-so-subliminal messages like “YUM” and “FRESH” and shit. This was their spin on the subliminal. The title being Subliminal, the coloured “sub” lettering which matched the the Sub in Subway, and these almost pathetic, obvious snippets of “YUM”, and “FRESH” and “HEALTHY” popping up throughout.

Then one day my eye caught something in the ad. Right before the very obvious “YUM” or “FRESH” subliminal snippets, my TV glitched, and this happened every time. It was incredibly fast, barely noticeable. Now to give you a brief backstory on me, I was always fascinated in TV advertising. I used to watch ads with more intensity and enjoyment than actual TV shows (I now work in advertising by the way), so I decided to load in a VHS (yep, we’re going back that far) and record the next Subway Subliminal ad I saw.

A few days later I managed to record the ad. I rewound the tape and played it on tracking, and I actually captured the real subliminal message that appeared at least 5 times throughout the commercial. Now the following is not it, as this is just taken from my memory, but I did sit down and draw this in thick letters at the time (I also loved drawing logos back then) so my memory is probably half right.

FЯ↓PT

I remember the backwards R, the downward pointing arrow, and that it was five characters (the F, P, and the T I’m only half sure but I know it was three normal, capital letters). This 5 character word or symbol was as huge as the screen, bold, jet black, on white background. Nothing else.

I kept the tape and showed the family I was living with. No one cared. I let it go, but was satisfied that I’d cracked the code.

Years later I started university and one of my assignments was about unconventional advertising methods to which I immediately raised the issue of the subliminal ad I’d discovered. My lecturer didn’t believe me so I decided to write Subway and ask for proof. Their response was flat out denial. It never happened. I’ve since scoured the Internet looking for proof and interestingly, instead of finding anything I’ve found these joking, shill type YouTube videos were people find the word “Subway” in Subway commercials. To me, this is a weird correlation. Why do these wank videos exist at all?

Anyway, that’s my story. I swear to fucking god it’s true. And no, I no longer have the video.

To this day I wonder what the subliminal message was supposed to do to the viewer (probably feel hungry - but how?), why Subway denied it, and why there are, what I believe to be cover up videos of Subway subliminal messaging to this day. It’s almost like they’ve intentionally created a false truth about their subliminal ads so any search finds those instead.