Seattle Times shows us an ad that is amazingly un-PC - the most offensive bit is the headline: It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell ... Consider it a gift from above.

The ad shows soldiers climbing from an Osprey helicopter onto the roof of a Mosque.

It is as if our pal caffeinegoddess summoned this when she wrote the article Brands get consumers involved in advertising, about timex, converse, Ban deodorant and Chrysler all are running competitions where the punters make the ads and can win something.

Geico wants you to submit a trailer with a concept for a feature-length film featuring the gecko, and you could win a golden gecko, a trip to Hawaaii or a bigger TV to watch these punter-made ads on. Oh joy.
Are the ad agencies fired or on vacation? Wonder what made this rash of consumer-made ads trend happen.

Yikes, American Idol is now officially No.1 with a $705K price tag on a 30-second spot. AI is the most expensive show on network telly for the second year running, proving that it ain't cheap to be that tacky.

After being up for only one day a billboard in Auckland for Auto Trader's website will be taken down voluntarily. The issue is in the headline, causing people to complain.

The ad campaign for the Auto Trader website was meant to poke fun at Auckland drivers with the slogan: "We've got rides for dirty bitches." The billboard features two dogs looking out of a car window.

Researcher: a PR-spin in the blogosphere tells the rather odd story of recent ongoings in the Swedish blogosphere, which is still small enough to serve as a medicine ball in PE.
The story begins when the national tabloid Aftonbladet publishes an article about "the biggest blog in Sweden", which is supposedly their own journalists stop-smoking blog, according to numbers dug up by the bloghost he is using, BlogSoft. Clearly, independent objective parties haven't even touched that article and it fails to explains whether blogs that aren't using BlogSofts solutions were even counted at all. You with me so far? Blogsoft says, to Aftonbladet, that the biggest blog is the Aftonbladets journalists, who hosts his blog at BlogSoft. Aftonbladet publishes it, congratulates their own journalist and mentioning his blogging software company Blogsoft repeatedly. (more inside)

Texans aren't happy with one of Allstate's latest ads. They claim the commercial is using fear tactics to get people to buy more car insurance or else risk losing their homes.

Tom Kelley, a spokesman for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, said the office may order Allstate to pull the plug on the ad, which started airing Aug. 22 nationwide.

Allstate officials said the commercial is meant only to alert homeowners to serious consequences that can result from inadequate auto insurance coverage.

"The ad is not intended to communicate that a forced sale of the home occurred," Allstate spokeswoman Kim Whitaker said in an e-mail response to the criticisms.

Texas law prohibits misleading advertising. The state attorney general's office is considering sending Allstate a letter with the ultimatium to make the spot more accurate by including Texas Homestead Law or pull it off air.

The Malcontent shows off the new Dolce ad exclaiming Sweet!.

Oh dear.
One Million Moms insist that the "DISH Network commercial teaches kids to use crude language". Yep they are actually talking about the campaign of ads that don't suck which we showed y'all here last week.
The One Million Mom site wants you to take action against such horrid langauge in TV commercials and have this nice pre-filled in email form which will send a mail to the DISH Network founder and Chairman Charles W. Ergen, two senior vice-presidents, and the consumer feedback department. Dish network might thank their lucky stars as a little dash of controversy can raise the campaigns awareness tenfold! Yeay! Maybe they'll get miles and miles of free press out of this. Thanks Million Moms!

Super adgrunts, hear the scandalous language for yourself.
Hat tip to rzklkng's post at Metafilter.

The metal band Slipknot are threatening a lawsuit over the latest Burger King ads - sending this C&D style letter to Burger King headquarters and Crispin Porter and Bogusky which the Smoking Gun shares with us.

B.K Lawyers posse in turn notes that many bands "wear masks and/or make-up to accomplish a mask-like effect, including but not limited to the bands KISS, Gwar, Insane Clown Posse, Mushroomhead, Mudvayne, Marilyn Manson, Los Straitjackets, and the Spits."

I'm wondering if this was just a smart move by Slipknot to get them some more press attention, and the BK campaign.. and... Wow, I'm way too cynical... But maybe CP&B people leaked the document to the Smoking Gun because god knows it'll be all over the web in an instant now. Hat tip to Researcher who was up earlier than me this morning. ;)

This is truly bizarre but the ASA thinks that using "balding" and "paunchy" men in booze adverts would be less likely to encourange woman to drink to achieve social success. So the booze-makers have actually been ordered to have uglier men in their ads, as the new advertising code stresses that there should be no link between alcohol and seduction. As if only Ken-doll type pretty boys know how to seduce a woman.

Lambrini is the first drinks maker to get a slap on the wrists, as their latst ad shows three women hooking up a guy in a parody of a fairground game. The ASA said to the Lambrini firm:

"We would advise that the man in the picture should be unattractive - ie overweight, middle-aged, balding etc.

Sometimes ads find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Back in '97 when cutting edge news sites employed a keyword system to get the right banner near the right articles, it seemed like a great idea until a banner for Mercedes showed up above an article about Princess Di's death. Since then we've seen many more combinations like that, this usually doesn't happen in printed newspapers. But last week, Politiken newspaper ran an ad with a somewhat unfortunate visual of a girl holding a video-camera..... Perhaps I was the only one who noticed.

Could there possibly be anything worse than someone setting you up on a blind date..... Without you knowing about it? Why yes, your co-workers could build an entire website around your date-life like the Date Lance.com the office of Logoworks created for their employee, Lance. To top it all off, they bought a huge billboard for Lance in Lindon, south of Salt lake City.

Why the rush? Even is Logoworks claims that 31 year old Lance is fast approaching the male-equivalent of an 'Old Maid' around their parts, we think this was simply a clever idea to get some press. It worked! Both ways, Lance is getting dating offers and Logoworks is getting mentioned in print everywhere. Lets hope they all live happily ever after.

Read more at Washington Post and Cnews canada.

Not all copywriters are super proficient spellers or grammar scholars. But that's why it's important to have a good proof reader on your team. Or at least a second pair of eyes to double check copy you might have been staring at for days or weeks. Spellcheckers can sometimes only help so much.

Want to see why proof readers are important to keeping your brand from looking like a fool? Read on.

Nikolai Borg, 86 years old, retired ad agency owner and graphic designer has filed suit against VW claiming that the Nazis stole his logo. Almost 60 years later Mr Borg will finally meet VW in court next month to settle the score. From the Telegraph

Mr Borg claims that his involvement with VW began in June 1939 - six years after Adolf Hitler met Ferdinand Porsche to discuss his idea for a "people's car" that could carry five people, cruise at up to 62mph, return 33 mpg and cost only 1,000 Reichmarks.

Oy vey, did they send Coke PR people to the charm-school of Lizzie Grubman or what? First some fool in Denmark tells a site not to link to coke, and now Coke India are threatening to slap a defamation suit for Rs. 2 Million on a photographer simply because one of his photographs doesn't appeal to Coke.

Bad move, brown sugar water. In India coke already has it's problems with goodwill, especially in the south where the Plachimada Coke-botteling facility was shut down after intense community pressure, but has now been re-opened after the the Kerala High Court now has permitted Coca-Cola to extract up to 500,000 liters of water from the common groundwater resource per day. See "Let Them Drink Coke" at IPnews and google newsclusters about it, or head straight to India Resource for more Coke India news. Apparantly it takes seven times as much water to create one bottle of Coke, a process that can't bode well for areas that already lack, and thus need, water.

So when Sharad Haksar took a quite poetic photograph of colorful pitchers lining up in front of a waterpump, which just happens to be situated near a wall that has a "Drink Coca Cola" ad painted all over it, and to top it all off displayed his art on a billboard, coke wasn't happy at all. The gall of this artist! Coke claims this billboard has done 'incalcuable damage' to their brand and want it withdrawn immediately, they also want "unconditional apology".

Oh my word..... This commercial (windows crappy media only) has an animated rapper chanting "there will be no hubba hubba if you ain't got no rubba" and is part of the New Zealand government paid safe sex campaign.
It' also so bad it feels like a parody. They're kidding right? Never mind that hubba hubba sounds like a pink sweet gum, the whole execution ooozes cheese. Must watch, try not to laugh.

Super adgrunts, quicktime version available here.

... It's become such a common occurance that I'm actually suprised nobody has written some sort of portal or firefox plugin to hunt down the media-space auctions only at Ebay. Any plugin writing wizards feel up to the task? ;)

Meanwhile, here's yet another action, you can buy the full back cover of the Cambodian Yellow Pages on Ebay. The sellers are interquess.com, an expat ad agency/web agency in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Thanks Miika!

There are naming agencies out there who check your new name against every conceivable slang or foreign language so that you can avoid stepping in it and choose embarrassing names like the Probe car.
Seems Kellogg's forgot to call them when they began stocking the shelves in the UK with their chocolaty crunchy cereal Coco Rocks. Drug users and those in the know have been snickering at the name ever since the launch earlier this year as Coco Rocks means "dark brown crack cocaine" to them. Oh dear!
Though as any parent will tell you the sugary cereals do seem to have the same addiction rate as crack among kids, buy them once and they never return to sugar-free cereal - so perhaps it's simply truth in advertising after all. ;)

Deseretnews reports that Golden Palace bought forehead space on a woman for $10,000. We've seen forehead ads before, in commercials, in the Guardian, by the Cunning Stunts agency, on young firefox fans. All done with the same stickers used on boxers in the ring. We concluded the forehead hype had reached fever pitch, and honestly thought we'd be done with this by now.

Bot nooooo.

The super annoying Golden Palace .com are riding their wave of free press by announcing yet another inane Ebay buy. And the Deseretnews are playing right into their hands by reporting about it. Alas, despite - or perhaps thanks to - someone sending photographer Keith Johnson to the scene I can't believe it. Why not? Well look at the shot kids, its a sticker. Why, there are companies that broker in real tattoo ads out there, but this ain't one of them. Look at the image upper right, carefully now. Yes, the paper has been hoaxed folks. (much larger version of the same image)

Outpost.com ad 1998

Update 1 juli 15:30 Danish time: (read more)

Is Intel "inside" your photo prints?
Of all the strange things to lay claims to. Microsoft once wanted "windows" to be theirs alone, UPS laid claims to the color brown. Now Intel seems to own "inside".

Intel has successfully caused the British online photo service FotoInside Ltd to change its name to FotoInsight. Intel Europe's representative, the law firm Howrey Simon Arnold & White states in a letter to FotoInside Ltd the word "'INSIDE' format … was coined by our client in 1991 when it began using the INTEL INSIDE mark" and requests from FotoInside to change its name.