VW Rock Campaign Gets Parking Ticket

Adrants reader James Gardner snapped this camera phone shot of a street promotion that's part of the currently running VdubRocks Volkswagen campaign. The vehicle in the picture was outside a guitar store on Boston's Boylston street and guitars were hooked up to the car just as they are in the ads. Noting the bright orange parking ticket on the windshield, the Boston Police Department didn't take too kindly to the promotion blocking the sidewalk.

Iran Not Hot on Cleavage

Gawker reports a Swedish gentleman by the name of Jonathon Lundqvist returnd fom a trip to Iran with copies of several western magazines he purchased at a newsstand. All of the magazines are manually censored blocking out areas of the ad which are deemed to be too risque. It's not the censorship that's surprising but the manual labor involved in black inking all the "too revealing" content

Gawker Craps In Donny Deutsch's Mouth

In an amusingly scathing piece about Donny Deutsch's Gotham magazine feature "Deutsch Mark," Copyranter, on a Gawker writing assignment, takes a look at Donny's work and concludes it's all just another piece of fat-headed self promotion. Analyzing article word counts, Copyranter finds the Donny, without surprise, likes to talk more about himself and his Big Idea show than the article's subject matter. But we aren't going to complain because, Speedo aside, we'd love to be as famous as the Deutsch man, have out own TV show and have Gawker crap down our mouth too. Oh wait Jessica's gone and we haven't tasted the new shit yet.

Gamers Not Happy With Game Maker's User License

Now that Electronic Artists has more fully integrated advertising into its games, it has sent out a new End User License Agreement and Adrants reader Dario Meli tells us most aren't happy with it pointing to an ars tchnica gaming forum. In the forum, most are displeased with EA's collection of user information (though anonymous) but more so with the company's perceived double dipping. Forum members think it's unfair for EA to collect ad revenue without using it to offset the cost of games as is usually the case in other media.

We're sure everyone's just beginning to learn here and that most of these seemingly illogical practices will be weeded out as the marketplace matures. Though, for now, EA has a few gamers up in arms over its integration of advertising into its games.

Jeep's 'New Species' Continues to Infect

Like a plague rolling across the land, the Jeep Wrangler campaign with its "new species" keeps invading more and more media space including storescapes, billboards and bug cases featuring miniature versions of the Jeep in bug form. This campaign's certainly got legs. OK, that was bad, Really bad. See more bugs here.

Disgruntled Client Videos Client-Bashing Agency

This sounds fake, looks fake, feels fake an probably is fake. Hopefully, it's not another Agency.com Subway video disaster in the making. Posted in the Adrants forum and on YouTube is a video taken, apparently, by a client's cell phone camera which shows the agency bashing the client while she was out of the room (she left her camera phone on as she left). The text of the conversation, which you can read here on a blog called The Disgruntled Client seemingly set up simply to trash this client's agency, seems contrived and fake.

Some Adrants forum members have doubted the purity of this video and the blog surmising it to be just another poor attempt by an oh-so-cool agency to promote themselves using attempts at social media wit. We've sent an inquiry to the blog's owner for clarification but have not yet received a reply. We're leaning toward fake but we'll report back any information, if any, we receive from The Disgruntled Client.

Farley Interviewed, Restaurant Video, Yahoo Humbles

- Brandweek interviewed Toyota Group VP Jim Farley, named the publication's Grand Marketer of the Year, who shared his ideas on what Toyota is dealing with from a marketing perspective and how he plans to move the car maker's marketing forward.

- Moe's Southwest Grill has hooked up with ViTrue for a make your own commercial contest which will be hosted on Sharkel and on the restaurant's site.

- "I am not satisfied with our current financial performance, and we intend to improve it," Yahoo's Terry Semel said. "We are not exploiting our considerable strengths as well as we should be, and we are committed to doing better."

- With interstitial comes ons and embedded text ads, job sites such as Monster and others are implementing ever more intrusive forms of advertising to keep their business model afloat.

- Running for governor in Texas is a kinky business.

IntelliTXT Thinks Bill Murray Hangs With Porn Stars

While it may be true that Bill Murray does, actually, hang with porn stars, we're thinking if he's good enough to hang with Scarlett Johansson, he probably doesn't need porn stars. Having said that, our favorite text-trashing text link poster child, IntelliTXT thought the "actors" Bill Murray was with when he played golf the other day might need a little help scoring their next gig and helpfully linked them to xxxpornjobs.com. (You do know that's not a work-safe link, don't you?) Don't you just love contextual advertising fuckery?

1-Click Answers Bubbles Up Info, Ads

We are no fans of in-text advertising from the likes of IntelliTXT and others but this new offering from Microsoft and Answers.com, 1-Click Answers, is user initiated and offers more than just advertising. With 1-Click Answers, which is a recommended add-on in Microsoft's IE7, people who Alt-click on any word will be presented an "AnswerTip" information bubble providing relevant information relating to the selected word or phrase. Clicking a "more" button in the bubble will take the person to the Answers.com site. 1-Click's advertising angle is the presentation of contextual text ads, currently provided by Google, at the bottom of the bubble. Broadening the use of the application - and reach for advertisers - 1-Click Answers will also work within any text-based desktop application. We probably wouldn't use it but we don't hate it.