In what must be a case of "bored Art Director", British Airways company magazine showed off their newfangled mobile ticketing service... with a ticket made out to "Osama Bin Laden". Yep.

People noticed, and soon a British Airways spokesperson was on ABC news apologizing and said "A mistake has been made in this internal publication and we are working to find out how this occurred". That AD is like so fired, y'all.

With BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico disaster creating a mess to clean up, now BP have more than their fair share of PR-fallout to clean up as well. The twitter account @BPGlobalPR has been spewing hilarious but clearly not-from-BP entries for days and the Greenpeace redesign the BP logo contest which they launched with this youtube video has produced all sorts of bastardizations of the BP flower, including one bike where the wheels are the flower and BP stands for "Boycott Petrolium". My favorite? the logo with a slight change of color.

Yes, I know what you're thinking, using Hitler in fashion ads would be offensive to anyone, right? We've walked down this road before, from Nazi fashions in Hong Kong to Nazi styled skin creams.

But the ads for 'New Form' jeans, with the pink Hitler wearing a heart instead of a Swastika, which carry the line , "Change Your Style. Don't Follow Your Leader." were not intended to offend, says Daniele Manno who is behind the campaign, but "incite young people to follow their own style and not to be conditioned by leaders.". As long as they wear 'New Form' jeans, of course.

The ads have predictably sparked outrage in Italy, is described as shocking, and will be dancing around the press for days to come. It's almost as if they'd planned that, innit? With any luck it'll be as talked about as the sex with Hitler AIDS campaign. Adkids take note, the Hitler card still can't be played yet. Unless it's a scam ad for Luxor highlights.

In a time when social media advertising is the hottest buzzword around it's disconcerting to find that one of the largest brands of feminine hygiene products is being used by a pervert in order to gain young women's trust on MSN, to ask intimate questions about their periods and sex life, for nude images of the girls, and in one case even for a meeting with one of the girls.

Libresse has gone out with a press release last week, to warn young women to not engage with anyone claiming to be from Libresse on MSN, they've contacted all the school nurses in the country with the same warning, and today they have followed up with a large ad in the morning papers. "Warning directed to young women" the ad is headlined, and the body copy explains that anyone who has experienced this should contact the police first, and Libresse. It's more likely that the parents will be reading the press ad, but Libresse aren't done yet.

The police are conducting an investigation into these cases; "We have a very good IT forensic team, computers are taken in and we can find things in them" and when probed about the difficulty of arresting a digital harasser Peter Bodenfall reveals: "Well, in one case he had arranged a meeting with one of the girls, which makes an arrest that much easier." Due to investigation being ongoing, he can not reveal more, nor how exactly this man grooms the victims.

Mimmi Lagergren at Libresse finds it "rather interesting" that the current commenting tide is turning against the young women, with the usual anonymous sarcasm quipping about the naivete of anyone who might "fall" for this kind of thing. You can see examples of this at Resumé.

"From what the young girls have told us, this is very cleverly done. He is very believable, very slick. This is why we've reached out with the warning to schools, in press releases and now in advertising. Don't blame the victims."

In Yours Truly vs. the Governor of Florida Davis Byrne explains that he's bringing a lawsuit against the Governor of Florida.

Well, using a recording of a song, or even just using that song and not the original recording, in an advertisement without permission is illegal, unless the composition has gone into the public domain. It’s not just illegal because one is supposed to pay for such use and not paying is, well, theft — it’s also illegal because one has to ask permission, and that permission can be turned down.
Besides being theft, use of the song and my voice in a campaign ad implies that I, as writer and singer of the song, might have granted Crist permission to use it, and that I therefore endorse him and/or the Republican Party, of which he was a member until very, very recently. The general public might also think I simply license the use of my songs to anyone who will pay the going rate, but that’s not true either, as I have never licensed a song for use in an ad. I do license songs to commercial films and TV shows (if they pay the going rate), and to dance companies and student filmmakers mostly for free. But not to ads.
I’m a bit of a throwback that way, as I still believe songs occasionally mean something to people — they obviously mean something personal to the writer, and often to the listener as well. A personal and social meaning is diluted when that same song is used to sell a product (or a politician). If Crist and his campaign folks had asked to use the song, I would have said no — even if they had offered a lot of money, such as I have been offered in the past for ad use (though I’ve always turned these offers down).

Repeat after me: get all rights to music before you air anything. It's advertising 101.

Oh dear.

The news is that senior producer for ABC's World News and a network vice president, Mimi Gurbst is leaving to pursue another career, namely one of a career counselor , and the gloty-bit says she has helped ABC people so generously with career advice over the years.... The comments respond, "and how". If you are to believe everything the comments ay, Mimi helped people with their career choices by terrorizing them right out of the office due to race, religion, sexual preference or the fact that she was plain having a bad day. Right now there's nine pages of angry comments, and it doesn't look like it's stopping anytime soon, as the comment section has turned into a ABC-employees whistleblower corner.

Some choice comments - where even the decline of journalism today is explained by the sub par leadership at ABC. From "FormerABCer"

Having worked for ABC for more than a decade, I am flabbergasted by the article on Mimi Gurbst. Even the most cursory reporting would uncover that Mimi is a producer who, when she oversaw the newsdesk, ran her operation as a high school clique. Popularity factored more into news gathering than either talent or understanding of journalism. Let me be clear: she was not--and is not--an effective leader of the news division and did not further journalism (or mentorship of journalists) in any way.
Sadly your lack of even the most basic reporting skills seem to coincide with ABC cutting some of the most experienced journalists in the field and both incidents indicate troubling times ahead for reporters of news. This is incredibly disheartening.

from "Disclosure time" written by the named journalist Richard Gizbert who had the unfortunate displeasure of being fired by Mimi Gurbst for refusing assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan - something he had all right to do and the UK employment tribunal agreed.

Finally: Don’t you just LOVE the internet? Don’t you just LOVE seeing this whole thing backfire on Mimi and the underhanded underling who tried to get away with this piece of fiction?
Mimi's so toxic that she's not just damaged the ABC brand. She’s taking down The Observer too!

The most interesting part of this story is that ABC is making sure it doesn't spread. Alas, that doesn't work these days. Or does it?

Resume reports on a rather unusual image-theft gaffe that appeared in an ad printed in Nyheterna paper in Oscarshamn. Someone somewhere had yanked an image off the web where they should have placed an image of Findus Fiskgratäng, with this image of Findus Fittgratäng, which is not made of fish at all if you scrutinize the NSFW image. The Swedish word "Fitta" means exactly what you think it means.

"We have a studio that works with [making the ads], and this particular image has in some way been fetched from the internet. It's crazy and should not happen at all." said Ulf Carlsson to Aftonbladet newspaper when this gaffe made national news.

Findus fiskgratäng is a classic dish that has been made by Findus for 50 years this year, it's a simple gratin made with Alaska pollock, mashed potato and a mild dill sauce. Lets hope this little case of image theft wasn't just a clever way of getting the ignored 50th anniversary some attention, because lord knows I just lost my appetite.

Graphology has a lengthy post about the sneakiest design ever. The Design uses haliation, a well known phenomena in road sign design that has birthed new typefaces specifically designed with it in mind, to make the viewer see something that isn't there. The barcode design is devilishly clever, once that red Ferrari starts dashing around the racetrack at X miles per hour.

See, Marlboro sponsors the Ferrari cars, but Marlboro can not brand the Ferrari cars in the EU. So they just whispered a zebra-design onto the car, and with haliation in action, you'll see the Marlboro brand.

European officials were not amused calling the Ferrari F1 barcode design a ‘smokescreen for cigarette adverts’. Ferrari has decided to remove the barcode design from the cars. Whatever they come up with next, I bet it's even sneakier.

Alissa Walker at Fast Company has taken note - and ripped apart - the new United & Continental logo mashup.

A comment adds this juicy quote, taken from the Wall Street Journal which reveals how this heinous merge of brand identities came to be:

"Since 2008, we've gotten to know each other," Mr. Smisek added. "Our teams work very well." The planned marketing brand, the United name and the Continental livery, logo and colors "was agreed between the two of us," Mr. Tilton said, instead of going through committee.

At underconsideration / Brand New a comment from Prescott Perez-Fox bitchslaps the CEO's for missing the much better solution.

Touché.

Lance Baxter, a.k.a D.C. Douglas, the voice of the GEICO commercials has been fired after insulting tea parties. Yep. FreedomWorks Bullies GEICO To Axe Voice Over Actor.

Los Angeles actor, D.C. Douglas, says he was dropped from the upcoming GEICO "Shocking News" campaign after a group of Tea Party members harassed him and the insurance giant over a private voicemail the actor left for FreedomWorks. Matt Kibbe, President and CEO of FreedomWorks, posted Mr. Douglas' cell phone number in a blog post on biggovernment.com, instructing readers to "Feel free to contact (him)… call his employer too. Let them know that you…are now in the market for car insurance." The next day, GEICO held auditions to replace Mr. Douglas' voice on the campaign.

Does this mean that the GEICO geckos are teabaggers?

Ouch.
The same day that Farfar shut its doors, they won a Bronze Andy award for the worlds biggest signpost.

Resumé has a choice quote from Nicke Bergström, one of Farfars founders, who now works at Mother in New York:

It feels like a wonderful irony. How can you be so stupid as to shut down something that is that good?

Or: Top ten reasons we hate using stock # 289.

Yet another irritant in Greek–Turkish relations has been found in Sweden, and this time it's yogurt.
The man who is depicted on the packaging of Lindahls Mejeri's best seller, the turkish yogurt, has found out that his face graces a Turkish yogurt package and taken grave offense. He's suing Lindahl's for 50 million SEK, as he is Greek, and still living in Greece and the packaging is ruining his image.

Lindahl's spokesperson Thomas Axelsson says to Sydsvenskan: "We're really surprised about all this. We bought the photo as an image of a Turkish man. On the picture description it said that he was Turkish." They bought the image from a stock photo agency.

You thought that we were done with the "Sorry I'm late" styled adverts by now, right? You should know better, of course we're not! Here's a timely example for Earth Hour. They call it "the first video controlled by a light switch" because you can switch the lights on and off, which is a pretty neat use of the extra features of youtube. For extra cool, they set it up so that you can watch it at the myearthhour.com/lightsoff
site, which would then react to your home lights with some nifty java I presume.
For extra uncool, earth hour usa forgot to take control over their whole domain and some linkspammy page greets you. Oooops.

It still looks like "Sorry I'm late", either way.

I've never quite understood the strategy of selling a beer on being "cold" (which would be my job to keep it so) rather than tasty, but everyone knows that an ice-cold beer at the height of summer is when lagers are at their best. So Spendrups did an ad with the headline "have a really cold summer", suggesting cold beer on hot days. They've now been reprimanded for having the audacity suggesting that beer should be drunk at all, forget seeing anything as advanced as the Jupiler Ice Beer poster here in Sweden.

This is the offending Spendrups ad that ran last summer. Shocking, isn't it?

A lesson learned for the UK Conservative Party, when trying to harness the power of social media and grassroots support, make sure you understand the tools you are using.

Over the weekend, they launhed the cash-gordon website, check out the google cache of cash-gordon.com, which would display anything tweeted with the hashtag #cashgordon. That's right, anything. It didn't take long before people were tweeting anti-Conservative messages on the Conservative's own page. But it got worse, as someone rightly concluded that unfiltered tweets aren't filtered for clever little things like < script > either. Presto, the javascript havoc began, and soon the entire website redirected visitors to Goatse

This lovely Flickr diagram shows the timeline of the #cashgordon twittertrainreck, my personal favorite is the end;

It's OK; we can spin this later as a bold social media experiment which successfully exposed why the web needs to be regulated. We can blame this on disruptive web nerds with too much time on their hands.

Of course, the Times online are already blaming this on "hackers" - trust me, had there been real hackers involved this would not have been possible to do in the first place. Do'h!

File under "fame-whore needs cash", Lindsay Lohan has filed suit against E*trade for naming the milkaholic baby "Lindsay" in their 2010 super bowl ad reports the NY Post here. Wait, what? Oh yes, Lindsay Lohan wants $100 million for the use of her first name in that ad, as her lawyer argues she is as famous as Madonna or Oprah.

Lohan's lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, said the actress has the same single-name recognition as Oprah or Madonna.

This is the offending ad.

"They used the name Lindsay," Ovadia said. "They're using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn't they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody's talking about it and saying it's Lindsay Lohan."

Lets be honest here, when "everybody" is talking about this ad, it's five people who are talking abut how this baby-campaign needs to be taken out back and shot in the head. They couldn't have planned for better press than this. Maybe they did.

Thanks @iboy for giving me yet another opportunity to bring up a fantastic story about Coke, the Olympics in Lillehammer, and a Norwegian brand of orange drink called Solo who pulled an "ambush marketing" move. Coke owned those Olympics, no other soft drink was allowed near it, and everywhere within the olympic area was Coke branded banners etc. Yet, when the closing ceremony was aired, the camera did a pan to the outside of the Olympic area and blinking lights on a hill spelled out the Solo logo. This has been told to me by silverbacked adgrunts (Stein Leikanger) and even confirmed in comments here but no photographic evidence yet. Luckily NYTimes Stuart Elliott who ad-reported about it back then saw it too;

The overwhelmingly banal and boring barrage of advertising had so deleterious an impact on this sore-eyed viewer that by Sunday night it had induced hallucinations that the name of a Norwegian soft drink, Solo, was visible in twinkling lights during the closing ceremonies.
Oh. According to the Reuters news agency, there was such an ad during the ceremonies, which the brand's marketer, Solo A.B., denies approving or authorizing.

Looks like that deny deny deny tactic is older than dirt.

Too good to be true is this story about the North Face who filed a suit against South Butt for trademark infringement.

North face vs South Butt. Aaargh, pun-overload.

The suit can be read in full at Patentlyo. South Butt is the brand for people who wanna lay around while being comfortable, while North Face is for those who like fleece and activity, so clearly there's a brand difference. But, the way the logos look, one could assume that south butt is the humorous after-ski spin-off of North Face. South Butt's defense is teasing: Can you tell the difference between a face and a butt?, in their media-driven defense move. They even have a updated legal part of their site now, showing how it's all coming along.

As anchorplateip points out that so-called parody defense isn't going to mean much if it turns out that consumers are confusing the two brands of fleece-wear.

Hat tip @LeslieBAP

SAMSUNG Media 2.0 seeding by the Viral Company fails spectacularly due to deep throat, clearly someone with insight to how the Viral Company operates has been calling each spammy-styled forum posting shilling Samsung out. The key to finding each post was searching for the domain moltoman.com/tracker/, and presto you'd find each forum post that had an embedded smiley in it. The domain moltoman.com belongs to Oscar Trollheden (you can't make stuff like this up), and he owns 30 more domains if anyone fancies opening pandoras box.

Meanwhile over in the UK, Computeractive found similar shills in their own forums.

But, is the problem limited to one rogue agency in Sweden? Some interesting posts on Computeractive's own online forum suggest otherwise. Take a look at this post, for example.

Since this users entire posting history is about glowing reviews of Samsung products, either a Korean fellar who really loves Samsung logged on to their forums wanting to share out of purely altruistic reasons... Or, more likely he's paid to do it. What do you think?

Hot on the heels of the Advertising Age article Social Media: Consumers Trust Their Friends Less where an Edelman Study showed that only 25% of people find their peers credible (Bill Green picked them apart on that when we recorded this weeks beancast, by the way). The article states;

"The mind-set is no longer 'I can just trust it because it's somebody's opinion,'" he said. "It's, 'I can trust that specific opinion because it's someone I know.'

The question is, has anyone blindly trusted the mystery someones opinion, and if they only recently stopped, isn't that due to spammy behaviour in forums like these now demonstrated by Samsung?

When I spoke to Erik Johannesson at Samsung he made it clear that the Viral Company were hired to "place video banners". I asked if showing youtube links in forums was "placing video banners" and he responded:

"Samsung has a policy to be clear as to who the sender is in all of our advertising. What the Viral Company are doing is new to us, and going too far. We can see that this has been criticized. We've put a stop this this. We will reevaluate our internal policy over this, and we will analyze our relationship with the Viral Company, before we continue with any new campaigns."

If Samsung's actual policy is to be clear who is the sender of a message, they might need to have a worldwide look at what their advertising partners are doing.

In Swedish forums across all genres and topic types, from renovating homes to designer hangouts, n00b members have been signing up and asking for a nice TV+Internet suggestions. They'll mention the SAMSUNG Media 2.0, and ask if anyone has tried it. They might even pop back in the thread and say that they bought it. But they're just shills from a viral agency.

Pers Värld calls it "Samsung gate", Bronsonid calles them "viral trolls" (both links in Swedish), as it's The Viral Company that are behind the forum posts. In each thread another new member calling themselves "Felmeddelande" or "KidCactus" soon arrives and calls them out on their spammy seeding. The hilarious part isn't their 2002-tactics, but that in each post they embedded a smiley to keep track of the campaign, http://power.moltoman.com/tracker/PMfegnEb/smile.gif, so every instance of their forum-spam is easily googled up. Ooops!
Even funnier, now that "felmeddelande" has toured all the forums with this info, searching on power.moltoman.se now brings up a bunch of threads where forum-dwellers promise to email Samsung and tell them how much they disagree with these tactics and swear that they'll never buy anything Samsung again. Not the effect you were hoping for, was it Samsung?

Soon @clindh, @pellet and everyone who is anyone in media and marketing in Sweden were talking about it on Twitter, so Samsung have at least spent some money on amusing us. Thanks! Per Torberger ( @pellet ) asks at the end of his post: Who the hell is "Felmeddelande"? Wouldn't it be juicy if it was someone from a competing viral agency?

Update I have phoned Samsungs press contact a few hours ago and asked" Did you jire the Viral company" which he declined to asnwer over the phone. He said that he would email a reply, but there's no sign of a response yet.

Update again Late Friday afternoon I received a call from Erik Johannesson at Samsung and we discussed this matter. He had looked into it, and did confirm that they had hired The Viral Company for "placing of banner videos", but the work they were doing had 'obviously expanded'.

"Samsung has a policy to be clear as to who the sender is in all of our advertising. What the Viral Company are doing is new to us, and going too far. We can see that this has been criticized. We've put a stop this this. We will reevaluate our internal policy over this, and we will analyze our relationship with the Viral Company, before we continue with any new campaigns."

For the benefit of Swedes and people who like to use google translate, here's his words:

"Framförallt jobbar The Viral Company med placering av videobanners för oss.
De har dessutom fört ut vårt budskap i olika forum. Att jobba på det här sättet är nytt för oss. Vi har velat göra ett test här. Vi märker att det har gått för långt och att det kritiserats. Vi har avslutat detta. Vi beklagar det här.
När Samsung kommunicerar strävar vi efter att avsändaren ska vara tydlig.
Vi kommer att se över vår interna policy efter det här.
Vi kommer att analysera samarbetet med The Viral Company och utvärdera vad som har hänt i detalj innan vi går vidare."