I don't know anyone who tries to do subliminal advertising now. They tried it back in the '70s or '80s with naked women and ice cubes. But it can't be too convincing or someone would be hammering me to do it.

I would imagine that it wasn't an accident in this, because when you edit an ad, you run it at a very slow speed. It's hard to believe that no one saw it. They're looking pretty stupid for doing this. No matter what they say now, there's still that frozen screen with the word rats there. By trying to use subliminal messages, the ad comes off as childish and low-brow.

Tom Dixon is creative director and partner at Meyer & Wallis in Milwaukee.

The ad is just like most other political ads. Creatively, it sucks. Whether it will be effective, I can't say.

Subliminal messages are an old debate in advertising, thanks largely to [Wilson] Key's book from the '70s. For the most part, I view this as a kind of witch hunt. But if anyone were to use it, I wouldn't put it past those mudslinging political advertisers.

This particular spot is using a device that's common to commercials -- adding movement to type to keep the viewer's attention. It's conceivable that the producers just stumbled upon this coincidence while editing the spot. Using a technique like this is usually trial and error.

But there is no way the producers wouldn't have noticed the visibility of the word rats -- no matter how brief. As producers, we nitpick this stuff to death, looking at it with a much more discerning eye than any viewer is ever likely to do. And if the producers had missed it, I'm sure the studio engineer or graphics person would have caught it.

My guess is it wasn't planned, but they discovered it during editing and said, "Hey, that works out pretty cool! Let's leave it in!"

Now, I must get back to work embedding secret messages into some adult diaper commercials.

Richard Blow is the former executive editor of George magazine, and is working on a book about John F. Kennedy Jr.

Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy thinks W. is dyslexic. I don't. I think he's schizophrenic. He claims he's a conservative, but in ads like this, he sometimes sounds like an FDR liberal. Let's add a prescription drug benefit for seniors to Medicare, Bush says. Medicare equals big government. Adding prescription drugs to Medicare equals big government spending. But then he turns around and says Gore wants government "bureaucrats" (yikes!) to be involved in his plan. Newsflash: Whether they work for the government or the HMOs, bureaucrats will always be a part of healthcare. So now W.'s for the HMOs, which makes him a conservative again. Then this ad closes with the words, "Freedom to Choose." W. is pro-choice?

This isn't dyslexia -- it's ideological incoherence. And it's slowly killing the Bush candidacy. The man has never given any serious thought to his political philosophy, so it makes no sense. And that's why his sentences don't either. It's all starting to catch up to him.

Oh, yeah. This ad also inserts a subliminal message -- the word rats -- near the end. I think that's a Freudian slip.

Dan Cohen is an associate creative director with DDB Worldwide.

I'm not sure why everyone is so concerned about negative subliminal advertising. For me, the word rats is just one second of a 30-second spot that rips on Gore. I think it was an adequate ad. I don't think that rats was accidental, but it was just a piece in a lame ad puzzle. Candidates are called worse things than rats, and I think that people are getting their knickers in a knot over nothing.

David Rosen is an associate creative director in the New York office of Deutsch.

There's no way it was accidental. They had to watch it a few times while it was being edited, and when you're editing something, you definitely look for a big gaffe like that. If it is really an accident, that would be the kind of mistake that someone would get into big trouble for.

The ad could easily work against Bush. First, people will think he's the kind of man who would OK an ad like that. And viewers will feel insulted. They'll say to themselves, "Does he really think we're that dumb, that we wouldn't like Gore because someone calls him a rat?"

Gad Romann is the creative director of the Romann Group, a New York advertising agency.

Anything that's subliminal in adverting isn't subliminal. It's just what people look for. In this case, it was obviously clear enough for people to catch it.

This campaign is taking the whole political game into a new low. The presidential campaign has dwindled down to such trivial issues. We should all say, "If you're going to continue with this kind of mudslinging, we're going to walk away.

Personally, it makes me lose interest in following the race. It doesn't turn me off one candidate or another, it just makes me think that the whole thing is not worth my time.

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