St. Louis Wants to See Your Nuts

We're thinking "Show Me" state, Missouri, didn't quite have in mind what the rest of us take away after reading this billboard which carries the headline, "The show-me your nuts state."

Agency Offers Pod Tips, Rocketboom Recharges

- West coast ad agency Ralston360 has a new, nicely done section of their site that aims to educate clients and potential clients on the merits of podcasting.

- Sans Amanda Congdon Rocketboom has landed its second sponsorship with Rechargeable Recycling Battery Corporation.

- Adrants reader Chris Kieff informs us he was told by Google he cold not use the fairly generic phrase "leaps and bounds: because it had recently been trademarked. He wonders how long before "Hello," "Welcome," and "Dear Customer" are trademarked.

- Ads is Japan are just plain weird. Then again, they probably think ours are strange too.

Alltel Promotes Calling Plan By Suing Itself

Alltel is running a blog ad campaign created by Campbell Ewald with site development by GMD Studios which promotes a fake class action suit against the company's My Circle calling plan. The ad points to a page on which an Edward Maxwell Von Houten claims he and many others have been added to Alltel's My Circle plan without there consent. Some witty copy turns the tables and makes the argument that paying to call your friends is better because it will eliminate turning people into gaggling idiots and somehow lead to anarchy. There's even a second site that follows the so-called class action suit.

Giant Ass Negates Need For Morning Coffee

Somehow we think Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts might not like this billboard for Joe's Jeans. After all, who needs a cup of coffee to wake up after passing by a giant, naked ass like this staring you in the face?

Sony-Bravia Ad All Over Flickr And YouTube, Promo Site Down

As we mentioned a couple weeks ago, Fallon would be creating a follow up to its Sony Bravia Balls ad. On a site set up specifically to monitor the creation of the ad, the agency released a lone photo of a random Glasgow UK skyscraper, the location where the ad would be created. Fallon has been very busy since then splashing paint all over the building by detonating paint bombs and all other manner of paint dispersal. Videos and photos of the creation have made their way to YouTube and Flickr. Apparently, people are quite interested in watching Fallon at work as this morning, the Bravia ad site is down. A nice problem to have, perhaps.

Warner Brothers And IMDB Hold Browser Hostage With 'V' Ad

Perhaps it's just us but this morning we have been attacked by one of those porn-style redirect ads. We were checking out the cast of the upcoming James Bond flick, Casino Royale on IMDB when, after about five seconds, we were whisked away to a promotional sweepstakes eprize page for the movie V. No amount of reloading on use of the back button would stop the fucking ad page from forcing itself upon us. Someone over at Warner Brothers or IMBD better get their shit together or start kicking the shit out of whatever spammer is foisting this crap upon us.

NOTE: In comments, an IMDB representative explains the problem was a coding error on their part which occurred for a short period of time and they fixed it as soon as it was brought to their attention. Warner Brothers had nothing to do with the error.

Master Schlock, Political Foolery, Men Washed, Animals Amputated

- This Master Lock commercial is bad. Really bad.

- Susan Kirkland tells the story of a politician who blamed the graphic designers who created his ad for the use of a doctored 9/11 photo as if to ignore the "Hi, my name is Pete Politico and I approved this ad" that's affixed to every political ad created.

- Anything called Manwash would, of course, have to be from the cheeky folks over at Lynx/Axe.

- Amputation might be an odd method to use in an animal protection PSA but Euro RSCG, Thailand thinks it's workable.

- Paul Levine, GM of Yahoo Local will appear Wednesday on a Kelsey Group teleseminar a teleseminar on local online advertising. Yahoo is covering the $39 registration fee for the first 300 registrants.

Layoffs Continue At Tribal DDB

Apparently, there's been a string of layoffs over at Tribal DDB (New York) despite recently winning a Gold Lion for the humorous shaveeverywhere. A tipster tells us, "Last month, they cut a bunch of freelancers and then quietly dumped a few creatives and a project manager. This time the cuts are deeper, including the general manager who's been busy driving the agency into the ground for the past year and a half." Sounds like the last layoff might have been a good one.

After Fake Blog, Coke Zero Moves On to YouTube Video

Coke Zero, those zeros behind the fake blog Zero Movement thing are at it again. As if moving down a check list of social media tactics, the company, after checking off "blog," has moved on to video and has uploaded three videos to YouTube in which two hired lawyers/actors supposedly punk random, unsuspecting lawyers by telling them they want to sue Coke Zero because it tastes so much like Coke. Yup. Coke Zero has gone out and created "faux consumer generated content" as one commenter called it in hopes the viral gods will bless their efforts. To be fair, the videos are OK. Though you can instantly tell they are staged, they are amusing even if they have that "we're really trying hard to get into this social media thing so bear with us" feel. There's three videos here, here and here (though we can't get this last one to load.)

Agencies Protect Their Turf Like A Baby Sucks A Binky

BigHeads Founder John Palumbo writes to tell of the trials and tribulations he goes through when trying to offer his services to agencies, many of which view anything other than their own idea as competition. We're just going to let John tell the story in his own words because we get a kick out of how it validates just about every fickle, nervous, running-scared agency mindset we've personally witnessed.

"I thought you'd find it interesting to hear how much bullshit we are running into when we speak to agencies about using BigHeads as a product for their clients As you know...we envision BigHeads to be both client- and agency-friendly (in other words...something clients could use and something agencies could use for their clients). Well...the agency approach is somewhat of a joke."

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