Pepsi Offers Playtime With Podcast Playground

Pepsi's Podcast Playground made a splash at SXSW taking over a corner of the Austin Convention Center doing interviews and making it easy for others to conduct podcasts of their own.

SXSW 2009 Kicks Off, Alex Bogusky in the House

SXSW Interactive kicked of Friday and if you've ever been, you know it's just, well, HUGE. There's no other way to describe it. A friend once dubbed it "the internet in real life." WHich is very true. EVARyone is here. Even Alex Bogusky. Yes, Alex Bogusky who did a panel on....um....bikes or something. We didn't get it really.

Anyway, there were only a few session the first day. Most of the action was in the hallways as everyone was registering and mingling and getting to know the IRL version of the people they've known online for years.

Oh...and commercial interruption (totally unplanned I promise)...I just met the CEO of blurb, Eileen Gittens, in the press room. The Killed Ideas project I'm working on involved blurb which will publish the work after I choose the final 50 killed ideas in April.

Back to regularly scheduled programming. Oh screw that. All you want are the picture, right? Well here they are.

'Guns, Blood, Drugs ... What Else Could You Ask For?'

Got this email blast from Echelon Studios this morning and that header totally perplexed us. What else could we ask for? In my mind, Steve was all, "Hot bitches!" -- and I was like, "...microfiber cloth...?"

The blast is a promotion for two (appropriately) made-for-DVD titles: Death Rattle Crystal Ice ("meth, murder, mayhem"!) and Blood-Stained Romance ("sometimes love doesn't have a happy ending"). Priceless blurbage from the latter:

Soon lies turn to murder launching Holden into a spiraling bloodbath of violence and desperation as he tries to hide the infatuation that feeds his madness. Through it all, he tries to cling to a trembling grip on reality, as love and pain coalesce into a shocking "climax".

Melodramatic run-on sentence? Check. Use of the irresistible "coalesce"? Check. Quotes around "climax"? Check, baby, check.

BlackBerry Tears Apple to Shreds -- Figuratively, Anyway

Agency Guava threw together this spot in which a Blackberry literally shoots through Apple. (Both are helpfully represented as fruits, and the tagline hypes BB's first-ever touchscreen model.)

Crystal-clear and slightly reminiscent of a long genre of late-'90s films where bullets penetrated human flesh at high-speed, ripping it to ribbons in slow-mo. (We like pulpy shit.) But I wouldn't throw myself behind the current iteration of BlackBerry's Storm for any amount of money, let alone pro-bono.

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Need a New Desk to Bend Over? Have We Got the Gig for You.

American Apparel peels its sleaze off for a second to make a public service announcement: "American Apparel is ... Jobs."

This crucial message is illustrated by a muscly bald dude who appears to be in the stock room. Which begs the question: where'd all AA's eye candy go? In a clime this dire, is all that tap-worthy ass just unwilling to lift its own load?

Dockers Makes Shakeable iPhone Ad

Dockers finally produces an ad that enables you to realize a fantasy you've probably had more than once: the ability to shake the living crap out of it.

The ad features urban street dancer Orbitron (Dufon) of Circle of Fire. He'll appear in iPhone games "iBasketball," "iGolf" and "iBowl," as well as lifestyle application iTV, AdAge says. At various intervals, users have to shake the iPhone to get Dufon to bust a move.

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...and Don't You Just Love How the Doc's Poppin' Candy Post-Op?

Skittles continues its mile-high "WTF?" spree with "Transplant," which illustrates a new pack of cross-breed candies with a guy who recovers from an operation -- only to find he's been crossed with a dude named Jose.

There's this weird moment where a pack of Skittles gets tossed hither and yon, then they eat them while facing each other and delicately licking -- kissing, really -- their own fingers.

By TBWA\Chiat\Day\NY. See its last little bit of magic.

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Mahou Makes You a Mite More Buoyant

"A Lighter World," where a couple pops open a bottle of Mahou and does a gravity-defying dance, is deliciously infectious.

By Agosto; featuring a cover of Pump the Jam by Canadian band Lost Fingers. (I realize that sounds not-very-savoury, but with a guitar in the background and a tap-dancing featurette the song is surprisingly fresh.)

Tagline: "There's a lighter world" -- riffing off the Premium Light status of this particular Spanish bev.

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Carl's Jr. Urges Doctors to Have A Bourbon Before Surgery

For a company like Carl's Jr. to say "Eat Responsibly" is a joke. Oh wait, it's supposed to be a joke or at least we hope it is because they've been hyping their fat-filled, artery clogging burgers for years.

It was one thing to watch a hot socialite seductively eat a burger while making love to a Bentley. It's an entirely different - and a bit disconcerting - to watch a doctor scarf down a Kentucky Bourbon burger between surgeries.

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Ladies, Join Wilkinson Sword's Garden Party

Looks like Philips Shave Everywhere, pretty cool at the time, has been upstaged by Wilkinson Sword's Ma Garden Party (se video here)which officially launches March 16. Hooking up with French singer Simone elle est bonne, the brand is out to show just how much fun it can be to "garden."

It's a catchy tune. We're sure it'd be even more catchy if we could understand the lyrics. But you don't really need to to get what's going on and understand the message.