Family Guys Gets Subservient Chicken Treatment

To promote the release of FOX's The Family Guy DVD, Fuel Industries has created a Subservient Chicken-like site, called Stewie Live, featuring the character Stewie. As is usually the case with these command-based sites, Stewie, of course, burps, farts and has sex. Beyond that, Stewie reacts to 160 commands so far and the list will surely grow. To view an homage to the grand daddy of this genre, be sure to type in the word "chicken."

IGA Gaming 101 Series Offers Industry In-Game Advertising Education

To help marketers and agencies understand and take advantage of gaming as a medium, has launched a series of Gaming 101 sessions. IGA hopes to educate the marketplace about the current and future videogaming landscape, the changing demographics of gamers, how the hardware platforms differ from each other, and how to run in-game advertising campaigns that get results.

Advertising agencies that have held or are scheduled to hold IGA Partners Gaming 101 sessions include Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, SS+K, Manning Gottlieb OMD, Avenue A | Razorfish.

A typical IGA Gaming 101 session provides an overview of the gaming space and gaming ad formats such as advergaming, product placement/plot-integration, dynamic in-game advertising, and casual gaming. Along with any form of consultant comes buzzwords and IGA's "Metrification," a proprietary in-game advertising quantitative and qualitative measurement and analysis framework.

Virgin Mobile Viral Helps Kids Beg Parents For Phone

Called Parental Enlightenment Kit, this site is packed with ammunition and propaganda kids can use to convince their parents they really, really need a cell phone. With pressurePoint presentations, pre-written emails, stickers, iron-on t-shirt patches, a tear-inducing thank you card, wallpaper kids can put on their parent's computers, and other stuff, the site arms kids with all the tools they need for the snow job.

Ruskin Says Channel One, Schools Promote Smoking

According to a new report (PDF) from Gary Ruskin's Commercial Alert "sixty percent of movies advertised on the in-school TV program Channel One portray smoking." Ruskin claims since January 1, 2000 40 out of 67 movie ads aired on Channel One portrayed smoking. Ruskin's group, of course, doesn't like this and claims the portrayal of smoking in movies causes 390,000 young people take up smoking each year.

Marijuana Advocacy Group to Launch Video Contest

It appears the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws is hopping on the consumer-created advertising wagon as indicated by this post in the group's Yahoo Group. The organization plans to launch a contest October 3 which offers a $5,000 prize for the person who submits the best, we assume, pro-marijuana video. Maybe the groups should also shoot for some product placement action on the now-popular Showtime series Weeds.

Wipe Your Ass With This Ad

As part of our continual bickering about the incessant proliferation of inefficient, un-targeted advertising, over two years ago we predicted toilet paper would be the next medium of choice. Well, yesterday, we were sent a link to Just Toilet Paper, a company that imprints toilet paper with all sorts of cutesy designs but that also sells ad space and, as it turns out, has been doing so since 2001. The company, which claims people go to the bathroom, on average, six times a day, will imprint a company's logo or design on various sizes of toilet paper. While there's certainly merit to this medium, what with it's "captive" audience, we're just not sure many brands want people wiping there ass with precious corporate logos. Of course, it's a great way for consumers to take out their aggressions on brands and shit all over the ones they don't like.

Creative Team Launches Advertising Comic Strip

A creative team at an un-named agency has launched, Words & Pictures "a comic strip about the adventures of a creative team in a large advertising agency. Too stupid to create avatars that would give us plausible deniability, everything in the comic is 100% true - with the notable exception of anything that would make us look bad or get us sued. That stuff's made up. New strips are posted every Monday." And, they are funny. Check them out for some industry insiderisms.