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This is an interesting thread, but so far (unless I missed something) we're focusing on the techniques and not the results. Advertisers can put "sex" all over their ads, but if it doesn't effect people, then so what?
The example with the snowboarding don't smoke controversy struck me. The article said the snowboard looks like a lit match (well, and it also looks like a snowboard), the clouds look like smoke (don't clouds almost ALWAYS look like smoke of one sort or another? Those clouds don't look like cig. smoke to me), and the mountains look like mounds of tobacco at an auction. It's that last allegation that irritated me the most. OK, so let's say they do. Exactly how many students - much less people - do you think know what a mound of tobacco at an auction looks like? I certainly don't, and I'm almost 30.
So if the majority of students aren't going to know what the stuff looks like, then how can a picture that's supposedly mounds of tobacco in disguise possibly influence them?
Let's look at the sex-in-the-ice-cubes picture in the gin advertisement. OK, so they wrote sex in the ice cubes. What evidence do we have that the technique worked? If people saw the ad and bought more gin, how do we KNOW it's because of the word "sex" and not because the gin in the picture looked really tasty?
I'm not saying subliminal advertising doesn't happen - it does, and there's lots of documentation to back that up. Where the documentation falls short, however, is whether or not the technique is effective. In short, is it really something to get up in arms about?
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