Have a Heart; Save a Manatee for Mom

...because she'll want you to -- way more than she wants that gold necklace, or dinner with you at her favourite restaurant, or a DVD copy of Flashdance.

There's something about this Mother's Day campaign for the Save the Manatee Club that appeals to us. And we're trying really, really hard not to believe it has anything to do with Conan's manatee fetish effort.

Yes, But Will There Be a Technicolor Dreamcoat?

If you can't afford LSD, mark your calendars (February 15th) for the debut of The Sound of Color.

"Does red sound like gurgling, molten lava?" the website asks. "Does green sound like the familiar tune of wind whistling through the trees? Do black and white even make a sound? What is the sound of color?"

We played with the idea of going, "Oh my, what is this? What is this?" but the truth is we already know because we wrote it up for MarketingVOX. This is a Gap campaign for which artists will write songs and make videos about color in all its tie-dye glory.

The site will hock colorful swag and free music downloads. After a month, artists will regain the rights to their songs, and some of the meaner ones might decide they don't want you downloading their pigment-inspired masterpieces for free. As with manna, hoard as much as you can.

Cilantro Encourages Intimacy with Multi-Flavoured Hispanic Market

When it comes to targeting the elusive Hispanic consumer, Cilantro Animation has this to say: "Be prepared to offer more than just Hola!"

(Though we'd like to point out that strategy worked wonders for Dora the Explorer.)

But Cilantro -- which creates Hispanic cartoons like the one at left -- makes an interesting point. When we hit ad:tech Miami we were overwhelmed with a sense that the Hispanic market remains unimpressed with the way big media has (or hasn't) tried to reach out.

And indeed, a salsa-colored Hola! just doesn't cut it when you consider the range of ethnicities blanketed under what we breezily dub Hispanic: Mexican, Cuban, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Colombian, Ecuadorian, and others -- all with their own cultural customs, jokes and sensitivities.

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Christine Aguilera Debuts Ginormous Breasts (and CD) At Best Buy

Last night at a West Hollywood Best Buy, Christina Aguilera turned (and perhaps lifted) heads when she made her first post-pregnancy appearance. In support of her Live and Down Under CD, she made one woman cry and, in an interview, told Ryan Seacrest on his KIIS morning show, "I'm very excited [about] this whole incredible thing that's taken place in my life, between the pregnancy and the birth. I've been brainstorming for the last nine months of my pregnancy. This next album will have a whole new me. A different me." Very different, indeed.

Google's Social Graph API Explained

Social media junkie Alisa Leonard has a video of Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, guru behind LiveJournal, Memecast and OpenID, describing the company's Social Graph API which makes it easy to determine social connections on the web. It's quite fascinating. If you like to know where your friends are and what they're doing online, this API can help accomplish that.

AdFemme's Lindsay Mure-O'Neill to Spice Up Datran

So Steve says, "But Lindsay, we never do hires/fires/career changes." Then Lindsay teases, "You want first dibs on letting the world know?" OK. We cave. Adrants to have a world exclusive on the where abouts of the [adjective redacted due to its possibly being misconstrued to focus upon beauty versus professional accomplishment] Queen AdFemme? We're all in.

Lindsay Mure-O'Neill founded AdFemme, a "community of women in advertising who network with each other online and at events to gain new contacts, clients, resources, employees and other femtastic connections." She's built the organization from little more than a single newsletter into an empire of content, resources and events for women working in many different industries and s now known as The Femme Network.

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Gear Factor: 'Come Fly Away in a Car-Shaped Balloon!'

Check it out -- a car that both flies and wheezes.

Video of the levitating wonder was sent to us by Gear Factor to promote its "flying" brands campaigns. If conditions are right, the balloons can play outside, too. GF calls its work "ambient media." Ooooh.

Pocket Change Speed Dating Gives Major Boost to Natural Selection

For men seeking rich older women, and older women hungry for pretty meat popsicles, check out Pocket Change.

This week Pocket Change is running a NYC-based event called Sugar Mama Speed Date, which puts a lowest-common-denominator twist on that speed dating thing. The application for men is totally appearance-based, and all entrants must be younger than 35.

Some of the hot hunks of man-toy are in advertising -- and guess what else! We get to show you their pictures and names. Get a leer at the sugar-mama-hunting ad-flesh up for grabs: Joseph Pergola, Jay Kelty, David Zarkin, Jonathan Hillman, and Brad Melshenker (don't be fooled by the context).

We actually didn't think these people were serious until we got photos of the harem. If someone would like to bring Adrants home some bacon a la Bennett, don't let your modesty stop you.

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Creative Brief Written For Next Year's Super Bowl Commercials

For all those out their anticipating (dreading?) creating an ad for next year's Super Bowl, Advertising for Peanuts already has the creative brief written so you can get an early start on what will assuredly be an industry masterpiece. The brief involves all the important things such as audience psychographics (they'll be drunk), the objective (it has to be funny) and target audience (everyone).

Get the entire brief here and be prepared for next year's game.

CareerBuilder Teaches the Timid to Reach Out and Touch Themselves

We're officially crazy about CareerBuilder's "Start Building" campaign, which debuted on Super Bowl Sunday.

Wieden+Kennedy, with help from a52 and (Rock Paper Scissors), gives us "Help You, Help You" and "Self-Help Yourself."

We didn't really get what was going on in "Help You, Help You" until the end, which had the odd effect of keeping us glued to our seats until we could make sense of it. We'll preface it thus: watching a guy stroke his own face, before lovingly carrying himself out of his pathetic job, gave us that "foreign-finger-in-our-bellybutton!!!" feeling.

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