FP7 lost their awards, they are no longer ad agency of the year, we now know what Jesus does - he makes sure that your unapproved ad campaigns for clients that you don't work for are noticed far and wide, shining the light on all of your other shady work. Oops! Official Lynx Award statement:

The 2009 Dubai Lynx Agency of the Year award has been withdrawn from FP7 Doha. The trophy will subsequently now not be awarded this year.
Investigations after this year's Dubai Lynx Awards Ceremony revealed numerous examples of work from FP7 Doha that did not meet the Dubai Lynx entry criteria and subsequently, these 18 submissions and the associated seven awards have been withdrawn.

Bonus: adgrunt Dellowe has a big scan from mediaweek on the story with the juicy headline Heads will roll at FP7. If that's not juicy enough a 'senior deep throat' at FP7 Doha claims that the scandal was "personally motivated" by someone within the agency though he declined to say who. Looks like Creative Director Fadi Yaish is in the firing line. To see the full extent of the scam ads you should look at enough is enough over at bloganubis.

Stock artwork, logos, copyright and the power of Twitter. A cautionary tale. at The Logo Factory sheds more light on the strange tale of a designer being forced to pay for his own copyrighted images... Or was he? Dum dum dum!

Jeezus. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the cut-and-dried case that half the internet believed it to be. To make matters worse, I managed to track down some of the images via Google and Stock Art’s search engine using simple keywords. I wasn’t terribly thrilled with what I found, especially considering I had been around ground zero for some of the anti-StockArt.com and anti-Artlaws.com sentiments now swirling angrily around the internet. I’m not particularly proud of that.

Be sure to check out that images link to get, uh, the full picture.

Scientists report that orgasms are still affecting short term ad memory since the O-faces used in two campaigns here are back again, now appearing in a commercial for Durex. To be fair though, there are thousands of o-faced commercials out there already, not all for condoms.

Brand new has a great review of Verizons logo redesign, looking like little fluffy clouds: Verizon Turns to the Clouds - meanwhile over at Improv everywhere you can watch the Best Funeral Ever.

And those are the most subtle April Fools jokes I've seen today. Well played guys. I particularly like the outrage displayed in the comments of Improv Everywhere even when the joke has been revealed.

Brendrepublic reports that pigeons are to be used to directly target consumers. Of course, the RSPCA are trying to stop the advertising gimmick.

The initiative, developed by creative advertising agency Creative Orchestra, uses GPS technology to sync-up with users mobile phones.

Using electromagnetism, the birds are able to navigate the location of their targets, using new patented technology called BYRD, originally developed for use in the American military. BYRD disrupts the pigeons natural geometrics and allows the GPS technology to steer it towards any mobile device.

April fools!

Every year I keep thinking that I should change the skin of Adland to pretend we've been bought by Google or someone, but I fear I might scare y'all half to death. Good thing other people don't mind printing pranks all day long - here are a few that I've found so far.
 
First up, perfect in this time of constant Twitter hype is the Guardian: The Guardian switches to Twitter only after 188 years of ink. This quote had me rolling.

Currently, 17.8% of all Twitter traffic in the United Kingdom consists of status updates from Stephen Fry, whose reliably jolly tone, whether trapped in a lift or eating a scrumptious tart, has won him thousands of fans. A further 11% is made up of his 363,000 followers replying "@stephenfry LOL!", "@stephenfry EXACTLY the same thing happened to me", and "@stephenfry Meanwhile, I am making myself an omelette! Delicious!"

Also in the UK; the BBC iPlayer is now available on a toaster. All this new shiny techstuff is great, but did you know that iPods get heavier the more music you have one them? If you don't have enough shiny to go around, use the Laminator to laminate your website.

 
Then Kodak, a company not known for joking, comes out with the Eye camera 4.1. Another home run, as I bet you said "wow I always wanted a camera on my glasses" just like I did. I honestly want one, Kodak, think about it.

 
In the nudge nudge, snortgiggle corner we have The Pirate Bay who sells out to Warner. Very funny, guys.

 
Mark Ritson Marketing Magazine spells the end of advertising - forget web ad blockers, now Prail sunglasses will eradicate any and all advertising messages in the wearers view. We're DOOMED!

 
Google can't help themselves,not only have they given us Gmail on autopilot, they also give us a new upside down layout. Consider yourselves p,lloɹʞɔıɹ. The Google Brain Search seems like a useful idea. With every film now in 3D your web browsing can't be left behind, leave it to google to give you Chrome on 3D.

 
Hotels.co.uk offer rooms on the moon, and that oh-so-obvious joke The Hotelicopter was a huge success, millions of web users and a whole bunch of bloggers fell for it. They might want to take an Expedia trip to Mars and wait for the hubub to die down.

 
As always, Thinkgeek go nuts, this year with extra bacon.

Your logo makes me barf has quite the collection of logo horrors - how about that dog mounting that cat? Friendly animals, indeed. For more accidental sex in logo's, check the phallic logo search here.

 
Font game is a game, with fonts. Fer shuriken. It's shooting practice and font skills testing at the same time actually, it's like they made this game for me. You have 4 seconds to shoot the right font when the little targets come up, do you know your VAG from your Bembo, your Interstate Regular from Eurostile?

 
There's a new page at tweeeeet.com to keep track of, tweeeeet.com/thedenveregotist shows the latest tweets from the usual ad-tweeting suspects. keep that window open to get an overview over the adtweets of the day, easy.
Speaking of adtweeters, the Angrydesigner is on an all caps rant against the world. He's like Adobegripes in tweet form. And ALL CAPS.

Hate stray quotation marks? You'll probably love the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks which has ample examples of the horror. Here's a sign where you might get donut-like food and a drink almost, but not quite, entirely unlike coffee: When the "alarmed" door is done freaking out it might join me in laughing. Bonus: quote abuse flickr pool.

"10 Shirts Every Type Nerd Must Own" does exactly what it says on the tin. Time for fresh tees as spring is here.

New site for adnerds has sprung up and it reminds me a bit of the Pit Of Advertising wonders from way back in the day in that is has fun ad-nerdy games to play. Over at Adiocracy.com you can try and guess what this product just made for guys is really for. If you said pretzels you win a bag of dry bread stuffed with processed cheese, congrats!

By the way, while I'm here hogging the mike, we do have a link page collecting all ad agency, ad collections, ad blogs and other ad related sites, but it looks like it's time to retire the adlinks for now in the way that they are displayed. Submissions as of late have been carton exhibitions (yes, really!) and everyone is emailing me links anyway. Back to the drawing board in regards to that then. ;)

Iphones killer app for creative types has arrived and it's called Kern. Like "Tetris for typenerds" you have to place a missing letter into the exact right spot of a falling word avoiding any unnecessary ligatures as you play. If that hasn't got you all exited yet, they throw in kern-puns for good measure, headlining the app intro: SPACE, THE FINAL FONT TIER. Bless!

More game nerdery: These guys show off by analysing the gravity variations in Mario games. I can honestly say those are the geekiest graphs I've seen in my life.

I know that many people are confused when it comes to copyright and FUD is thrown around like monkeys poo in many debates around the web, but everyone does seem to agree to stick to the US version of copyright when talking about it all over the world. If you're doing that, please keep yourself up to date. Recently, Burns Auto parts spots APA has posted about a new “registry” for copyrighted works which looks like it's created for the sole purpose of sneakily nicking the rights to selling your work. With the shady domain name c-registry.us contract says that the site’s owners get to do your fee negotiating with any users of your content that you put on the site. In other words, stay the hell away from it.

c-registry.us also talk a lot about the orphan works act - you know, the bill that got killed. Sure it was up in the Senate but with the $700 billion Wall Street rescue issue, the House was busy and the bill was dead on arrival. Repeat after me: There is no orphan works act.

Creating advertising stunts for video games has always skirted the edge - remember when Acclaim Entertainment said they'd advertise on tombstones? When a PlayStation 2 party was serving offal from the stomach of a freshly decapitated goat, when Electronic Arts gave away £20,000 worth of fuel to promote the game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames" causing London causing serious traffic jams and attracting the ire from the local MP for Hornsey and Wood Green,Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone, who said: "Trying to recreate Venezuelan-style fuel riots on the streets of London is completely irresponsible and downright dangerous.".

Well now we have reached a new level of tacky - as Resident Evil 5 launched a game of "find the body parts" thrown around London. Between nine and eleven today, hunters who've signed up to play have to figure out by way of clues where these body parts lie.

I admit, I love the idea though, if only for this part;
"Alert us to your presence by standing on Westminster Bridge, holding the artificial body parts over your head and shouting 'Kijuju!'. We will be there, watching you, and will approach when you make yourselves known."
A crowd of people waving dismembered body parts around while shouting gibberish quite close to the houses of parliament? Now that's funny.

Capcom's release read; "the infected have been and gone - but they have left behind the bloodied remains of their victims. Find the bodies on the morning of Thursday March 12th and win a holiday to Africa." - at 11 am the game is over, and I can't wait until the pictures taken by confused passers by show up on Flickr.

This could never have been done in Boston, where Adult Swim Boston LED Billboards caused panic. ;-)

The Denver Egotist points us to Ashley Billings shameless self promo. We laugh and recite the do you work in advertising or are you a prostitute joke to ourself. Then we recall "four-sprung duck technique" and now we need a new keyboard as this is permanently coffee damaged.

We calm down by oohing at The Periodic Table of Typefaces (here's the image close-up). We iz a nerd.

All over New York City you can find graffiti that reads Who is watching the Watchmen?, or in this particular case "Who is watching the Watchmemen". Watch-me-huh? Got a little carried away there didn'tcha?
Guerillacomm found it at arrestedmotion but neither source knows if this is the work of an ad agency or a bunch of over exited fans with spray cans.

For those of you gearing up for the premiere over here in Europe (In Sweden it's on this Friday the 13th, dum dum dum!) and if you fancy tagging sites instead, use the embeddable TV's from Rubberepublics Watchmen watch site. They've also created a retro arcade game, Watchmen widgets and even an iPhone app. There's also a youtube channel at thenewfrontiersman.

see also:
Watchmen - NBS nightly news / Dr. Manhattan - (1970) 3:00 (USA)

Watchmen - The Keene Act & YOU - (1977) 2:39 (USA)

EnglishRussia show off a enormous billboard and dub it "The biggest ad space in Russia". They claim that it is one and a half acres huge (6000 m2) and it even has a bunch of BMW cars stuck onto it, as if in mid-race on the side of the billboard. Each BMW on the billboard is a different one, like the M5 and M3 and so on, but I have no idea what the headline claims.

Nice touch: the headlights and breaklights are lit during the evening. Reports claim that the worlds largest billboard in Berlin is feeling inadequate.

While countless US agencies are doing the daft thing in order to save their bottom lines - that is firering the people who provide the product an ad agency sells - Grey Amsterdam is going in the opposite direction according to this release.

Grey Amsterdam is reorganized to have the creatives on top - Colin Lamberton and Seyoan Vela are now steering the ship.

This cracked me up. No, not the bizarre find of human teeth in a lost wallet, but the comments made to the article at Boston.com. Forget boogymen, now everything is guerilla marketing! Those who have been paying attention know that I have said numerous times that the use of lost wallets as ads might make people think each lost wallet is an ad in the future, so there's another I-told-ya-so notch in my old-ad-man cane.

The guy who turned in the wallet missed the boat. In another zipped compartment in that wallet was a note that says:
'Whoever finds this wallet (and my teeth!), gets a free dental checkup at Dr. We#$&ven's office."
It's a new guerrilla marketing campaign campaign that's spreading. If you find a foot in your laundry detergent, you get a free visit to the podiatrist.

NewMediaAge reports that "Spotify expands ad targeting as user numbers top 1m" and true targeting is revealed:

Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify, said he planned to build on its "above industry standard" click-through rates by allowing brands to buy ad space based on where users live and which tracks they listen to.

People getting wigged out about privacy issues in 4...3...2... Oh, who am I kidding - Spotify, like Google & Apple, can do no wrong in the eyes of their fans. Also, there's always the option of buying your way out of the ads with a subscription. Choice is good.

Will non-music related ads work in the all-music environment though? On that the jury is still out.

The COI, HMV, Nissan, Philips, Sainsbury's, Sony Pictures, Vodafone and Xbox are among the first brands to target Spotify's 250,000 UK users.

Dave Chase, head of music partnerships for Mindshare, said the start-up was rapidly heading for the mainstream. "We're at a point where it's becoming a more natural part of the conversation during client briefs. That's a good sign it's a sustainable model," he said.

Kevin Murphy, MD of Zed Media, which is about to launch a campaign on Spotify for Warner Music, said, "This is a very powerful direct-response add-on as it allows the attention-interest-desire-action model to be followed in minutes.

"As a direct-response medium for non-music brands, it will stand or fall on results," he added.

Overstock.com sells "RapeLay PC Game English Edition Sexy" on their website which to me looks like a PR-blunder of massive-ginourmous proportions. Yes, that Overstock, the brand with the "O" lady Sabine that drove brand recognition up to 46 %, and the female target market, is selling rape-simulation games in their auction area. For real. It's ten bucks.

Yesterday Amazon was selling it as well, The Belfast Telegraph reports and has this fantastic bit of info:

The game's producer, Illusion is a company from Japan famous for making similar 3D Hentai games.
The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, says: "Due to Illusion's policy, its games are not intended to be sold or used outside of Japan, and official support is only given in Japanese and for use in Japan."

...yes, because it only being intended for sale in the Japanese market makes it all OK? What?

Jezebel has an update see comment & link there

Interesting news today regarding twitter - both Brandweek and Techcrunch are reporting that Twitter might start charging brands for "pro" twitter accounts. How will this pan out now that everyone has a personal brand these days? Do I have a brand on twitter? I go on little theme-tweets travels like share Art Director wisdom and spend a whole day telling light bulb ad agency jokes, but really I'm just being my nutty old self a.k.a Dabitch®. ;) Is wilw a brand since he is actor famous and funny, much like Stephenfry whose fame comes from being funny in the first place - even though they are, like everyone else, just tweeting what they happen to be doing or thinking any day. What about tweeting companies? There are major brands on twitter handing us headlines like CNN and BBC, but small startups are sharing their passion for teas or energy drinks or whatever they do as well. This brings me to ad agencies.

I, as in dabitch on twitter and adland on twitter went on the hunt last night to try and find new ad agencies to follow, turns out that there's loads of ad agencies on twitter now.

Cliffbot is Tom Christmann the ECD from Cliff Freeman and Partners. adamkleinberg the the CEO of hot shop Traction twitters. I'm not sure if Dave Trott is the same Dave Trott who taught some Miami Ad school ad pups that they are a brand though since that account seems quite dead.

The agency who just let 23 people go yesterday Modernista! is on twitter - wonder if they DM:ed the pink slips. In fact, agencies from all over the US are on twitter like SteinRogan+Partners, New York, KGBAdvertising Cincinnati, OH, kelseyads LaGrange, GA, agencypja Cambridge, MA, fusionadv, Dallas, TX and RL_agency from Chicago. Heck, even the ad club of Kansas City tweets under the name adclubofkc and the student run agency cgadvertising from Iowa State University.
Europe represents as well, deliriumad from Barcelona, Saatchicannes from Brussels, while Greyemea represents everywhere in the world.
Alphabet-soup bigwigs are on twitter for example ClemengerBBDO, BBDO, and TBWALONDON.

Oddness abound with these though, TBWA is a no-follow-nobody zone, while HHCC, Arnoldworldwide and HillHoliday have been squatted by someone looking to "sell the names".

So will all or any of these accounts fall under the possible "pro account" rule in the future? Feel free to add any agencies that I missed in the comments, I want to find more - there's plenty of post production companies as well, not to mention PR people but if I list them all in this post I'll never finish. ;) Who are you on twitter?

I would love for this to be a real sneaky campaign for an upcoming Zombie Flick, I love Zombie flicks. I need to eat braaaiiins! Since I'm already in advertising and active on twitter, I have a leg-up on decent folks when it comes to becoming a real Zombie. As Fanboy so eloquently explains Social media experts on twitter are zombies and must be stopped:

The zombies then seek each other: You’ll always notice that of the 5,000 followers that a social media expert has that all 5,000 of them are also social media “experts”. Their only form of conversation is to quote each other and live tweet conferences where they gather. Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.

Please don't shoot me in the head, for I am but a lowly art director and do not aspire to become a social media guru of any sort. ;)

However, back to the real road signs, it's probably "just a hack" and as "a blog to be reckoned with" points out, it's not even that difficult to do since the geeky-fun people at i-hacker have been kind enough to provide us all with a step-by-step tutorial. I know what I'm doing tonight, wanna come with me?

You know SmashLab - the design studio at SmashLAB which made a big bang a few years back when I badlanded them for some Technocolor yawns. They're good sports though, and have since been on the forefront of design & digital media, launching all sorts of useful sites for the design community, like Design Can change where designers work for change, Ideas on Ideas a blog where design and the business of it is discussed at length, and most recently Undrln.com, a digg-style site where great design and relevant articles are dugg by the design community.

So, not being totally unknown in the business, imagine their surprise when a "fucking awful television program with the same fucking name" shows up. Their response : http://www.smashlabsucks.com/. Bo-yah.

Someone has taken the "Be Kanye" Absolut ads way to literally it seems, as Kanye complains that practically every online area he's using has been hacked, IN BOLD ALL CAPS so you know he's mad in case there was any doubt, over on his blog.

YOOOO WHY WON'T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!! I HAD THE TWO GREATEST DAYS OF MY LIFE AND WHEN I GET BACK FROM THE LOUIE SHOW I READ SOME SHIT CLAIMING I SAID I'M DOWN TO DO PORN AND SOME BISEXUAL PORN!!!! I CAN'T BELIEVE THE AVN WOULD POST FIRST PEOPLE BELIEVED THE TWITTER/STEVEN COLBERT THING, ROLLING STONE EVEN PRINTED IT!!!! NOW SOMEBODY HAS BEEN HACKING INTO MY MYSPACE AND SOMEBODY'S ACTUALLY HACKED INTO MY PERSONAL GMAIL ACCOUNT AND HAS BEEN EMAILING PEOPLE FROM IT... HEY WORLD I NO LONGER HAVE A GMAIL! I FOUND OUT I HAD TWELVE UNAUTHORIZED SKYPE ACCOUNTS UNDER MY NAME!!! THIS ALL IN THE PAST FOUR DAYS. WELCOME TO KANYE WEST WORLD! .... IT'S NOT OFFICIAL. I JUST GAVE THE PERFORMANCE OF MY LIFETIME FOR OUR NEW PRESIDENT ... THEN I FLEW TO PARIS AND THEY DEBUTED MY NEW SHOES THAT I DESIGNED WITH LOUIE VUITTON WHICH WAS A DREAM COME TRUE. PLEASE I BEG YOU, GIVE ME A BREAK!!!!! PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LET ME BE GREAT!!! WHO HAVE I HURT SO BAD THAT THEY WANT TO DESTROY ME? WHO HAVE I EVER SPOKE ABOUT SO NEGATIVELY? I JUST WAS SPEAKING WITH OUR NEW PRESIDENT TWO DAYS AGO... AND NOW THIS.... SIDEBAR... NEVER TAKE A PICTURE FROM MY OBAMA PERFORMANCE AND PUT IT NEXT TO A BS QUOTE LIKE THAT! THAT'S IN POOR TASTE! THAT UNDERMINES WHAT MY CONTRIBUTION TO THAT EVENT WAS AND SLAPS EVERYBODY WHO FELT UPLIFTED BY THAT PERFORMANCE IN THE FACE! A PICTURE SAYS A THOUSAND WORDS... LOOK HOW FRESH MY SUIT IS... NUFF SAID!

Still wanna be Kanye? If you missed the Absolut ads, we got 'em here: "Tablet" & "Infomercial"