Sushi Restaurant Places Dick Joke Advertorial in The Onion

Boulder-based TDA Advertising and Design has developed an ad for its client Hapa Sushi, a sushi restaurant, which parodies the ad evelopment process involving a focus group and the group's likening sushi rolls to a penis. With the headline "Sushi Restaurant Decides Not To Run "Dick Joke" Ad'" The not-an-ad will be placed in the Denver metro edition of the satirical newspaper The Onion. The entire text of the ad can be viewed here.

Best Buy Launches Kevin Kringle Campaign

You saw it here on Adrants a couple days ago. Best Buy recently launched an underground viral marketing effort to target its core holiday consumers. The company partnered with SMG Reverb, a division of Starcom MediaVest Group that specializes in digital word-of-mouth marketing.

Best Buy's online ads feature a fictional character named Kevin Kringle, who, according to Best Buy, is the younger brother of Santa Claus, Kris Kringle. Unlike Kris, however, Kevin struggles to find the right gifts for his family, friends, and co-workers. These struggles are portrayed in several humorous clips that are available on KevinKringle.com.

The initial phase of the campaign is designed to establish Kevin's character and to encourage users to talk about his lack of gift-giving talent. To keep the focus on Kevin, Best Buy purposefully left off all branding from its online ads. Even Kevin's website and the site's video clips started with no company branding.

Word of Kevin Kringle was spread online through partnerships with Best Buy evangelists, blogs, forums and pop culture and gaming sites. Best Buy will eventually start to incorporate branding on KevinKringle.com and ultimately plans to lift the veil on the Kevin connection through nationwide television commercials and promotional posters inside its retail stores.

Firms Pays Consumers to Wear Tattoo Ads

Now added to the Xvertising list is Tattoovertising. TatAd will pay consumers to wear a tattoo and become walking billboard for products. The company matches people based on where they live and their lifestyle with marketers who have expressed an interest in the medium.

Those selected will then be tattooed with the logo of the advertiser.

The company reports 800 sign ups. There'd probably be a lot more if the sign up process wasn't so cumbersome and illogical.

Desperate 'Real World' Star Sells Self on eBay

Yes, it's another sleazy eBay ad. This time, it's for Real World Las Vegas "star" Trishelle Canatella who seems desperate for attention with an eBay ad offering the highest bidder a chance to spend a day with Trishelle in LA. The Superficial points to the ad which currently has six bids, none of which have met the reserve.

The ad states, "Auction bid only includes the following associated with travel, accommodations, meal at Dolce, 1 DAY ONLY meet and greet with celebrity, autographs, and security. Any additional expenditure to that listed above will be the sole responsibility of the bidder. Length of trip may be extended by the purchaser, but additional costs are to be incurred by bidder." We wonder what those additional expenses might be.

Catholic Church Improves Image With Hottie Calendar

In a much needed effort to cast off its image as home to pedophiles, the Church is striving more for the Chippendales look with a new calendar.

While not as hot as a Maxim calendar, the Vatican will introduce a pictorial calendar in 2005 to promote itself. The calendar will feature priest hotties in an attempt to sex up...uh...improve its image among Catholics worldwide.

FedEx Logo Creator Interviewed

We've never seen it, have you? We're talking about the arrow embedded within the FedEx logo. Look closely. You'll see it between the E and the X.

Its existence was intentional and The Sneeze interviews Lindon Leader who created the logo back in 1994.

ABC Sports Gets Desperate With 'Desperate Housewives' Promo

Never to leave a promotional stone unturned, ABC featured the towel-clad Nicolette Sheridan, who stars in the ABC series Desperate Housewives, in a promotion prior to Monday Night Football. In the promo, Sheridan is seen wearing a towel in the locker room convincing Terrell Owens to skip the game for her. She then drops the towel and Owens gives in grabbing her in a hug of lust. Well, of course, all those red staters got up in arms about it and complained to ABC Sports who agreed the placement was inappropriate and apologized.

View the clip here and see what the big deal is about. Done? See. It's nothing. No big deal. Nada, No nudity. No nothing. Go stick your head back in the sand you neo-conservative, nothing better to do than complain losers.

New TiVo Feature To Effectively Eliminate Ad Skipping

Once the bane of advertising for its ad skipping feature, TiVo, will redeem itself in the eyes of marketers with a new feature set to launch next March. Tivo will introduce a feature whereby advertisers can purchase a billboard which will appear on screen when a user fast forwards through an ad. The billboards will allow advertisers to make offers and link to other ads, most likely residing in TiVo's Showcase - home for long form commercials. If a viewer opts in to the ad, their personal info will be sent to the advertiser enabling further direct marketing.

While advertisers will rejoice over the introduction of this feature, a consumer revolt is likely to occur. Upon introduction, TiVo gave consumers control and now it is taking it back effectively having tricked consumers into buying a product that will now serve to more finitely market to them. It will only be a matter of time before hacked products arrive eliminating all TiVo functionality aside from its hard drive based recording abilities. While we are sure patents are in place, an enterprising manufacturer could make a killing offering a simple TiVo-less "ad free" hard disk recorder. But, at least for now, the control pendulum has swung back to the advertiser.

Woman Offers 32C's For Fondling on eBay

An English woman (not pictured) in need of money to pay her college tuition placed an ad on eBay auctioning off 15 minute fondling sessions with her 32C breasts. Being english, she, of course, offered tea and snack along with the fondling session. Predictably, eBay wasn't amused and killed the ad claiming it broke the site's erotica ban. This site, however, does not have an erotica ban. Prior to cancellation, bids for her boobs reached $334.