French Kids Rain 400 Blows Down on Abused Moms

Responding to this British domestic violence campaign, Alt-Buzz decided to show us how the French do it.

Released by Young and Rubicam for La Federation Nationale Solidarite Femmes a few months ago, this ad demonstrates that when you beat your spouse, you teach violence to your children. The ending came as a surprise even to us. We've kicked cans, other peoples' glasses and the occasional pigeon but we've never kicked our moms.

Note to Selves: 30 Seconds Under the Faucet, 2 Pumps of Soap, 30 More Seconds

Women aren't much known for forgetting to wash their hands in public bathrooms (a lot of it is peer pressure, and hygiene) but the story may be different for men, who arguably may need it more than we do.

We're not generally huge hand-washing sticklers (it's good for the immune system, right?) but the psychological brainfuck resulting from this effort by Wash Your Hands may just change our dirty ways forever.

And if you couldn't already tell, we nabbed this one from Cool Hunter.

'My Super Proposal' Ad Finally Aired Last Night On 'Veronica Mars'

Now that we've spent the better part of a week pointlessly bitching about which Super Bowl spot was the best, we might consider giving the honor to an ad that, though intended, never appeared during the game. You might remember the guy, now revealed to be Rand Fishkin of Seattle, behind MySuperProposal who was attempting to raise money to buy a Super Bowl ad in which he had planned to ask his girlfriend, Geraldine DeRuiter, to marry him. Well, he wasn't able to raise the $2.6 million needed to purchase a Super Bowl spot and began talking to advertisers to support his effort as well as to CBS who were considering running the spot.

Unfortunately when half time rolled around CBS called to say the spot would not, in fact, air. Undeterred and with a $3,000 gift from his mother, Fishkin bought a local spot on Seattle's KSTW Tuesday night during Geraldine's favorite show, Veronica Mars.

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Company Answers All Your Email Marketing Questions

If you are involved in email marketing as a brand, as an agency on behalf of a brand, as a list owner or as a provider, you have certainly hit your head against the wall trying to process all the myriad details that go along with the practice; CanSpam issues, deliverability, response rates, affiliate relationships, effect of Subject line, proper frequency, spam filters, competitive activity, offer effectiveness and email design to name a few. A company we've been following for some time but have never written about is Email data Source, a company that answers all these questions. Each time we see a demo, we are amazed at what this thing can do.

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Joey & David (Try to) Spend 14 Days in A Civic

Internet comedians Joey and David have one-upped Nissan's 7 Days in a Sentra promotion centered around a guy named Marc Horowitz who lived in the car for a week. Having a bit of fun with the promotion, Joey and David produced their own version of the promotion called 14 Days in a Civic in which Joey tries very hard to begin his 14 day journey but is, sadly, interrupted incessantly by his parent's not so peachy keen relationship. Believe us, it's much finnier than the original.

Ford Reverses Stupid Decision, Brings Back Taurus Brand

In a reversal of one of the most idiotic brand decisions in decades, two un-named Ford execs said the Taurus name will return and be affixed to the two year old, poorly named Five Hundred. In 1992, 410,000 vehicles were sold. The Taurus brand resurrected Ford and outsold all other cars old in America for five years straight. The name as retired last October after 21 years. New Ford Chief Executive Alan Malally has been high on the name since he joined Ford last year. Most assuredly, the ad campaign supporting this launch will be large and far-reaching. Whether or not the renamed Five Hundred will be remotely as popular as the original Taurus is an entirely different discussion.

Virgin Money Offers Anger Release With Online Game

If for nothing more than to waste a few minutes during your lunch hour or during the excruciating boring weekly traffic meeting, have a little fun with this Virgin Money game, Lose Your Lunch Hour, in which you get to wreak havoc and physical damage to a bank branch of your choice because they closed the window right when you got to it. We like getting our virtual anger out and this game made it easy for us to do which is a very good thing becasue we suck at online gaming.

Family Explodes Into Tears Over Spilled Milk

Some spilled milk is worth crying over. This weird little ad from Hood Simply Smart starts out normal enough and ends in tears.

Hood is typically known for squeaky-clean happy-family ads so we're guessing some sadist in the ad department finally got his way. We're happy about it. The spot is quirky, plus we like seeing people cry.

Marketing Book Promoted With Intellectual Strip Video

In a mash up of a webcam stripper video and that news show where the anchors strip while reading the news, the authors of the book, Punk Marketing, have placed a video on YouTube in which a bespectacled, smart-looking, sexy woman, Cleo, reads an excerpt from the book while slowly removing her clothing. It's hard to pass judgment on this one since there are two ways to go with it. Close your eyes and listen leading you to believe you are present at a fancy book reading event or open your eyes, turn down the sound leading yo to believe you are just enjoying yourself watching many of the thousands of webcam stripper video floating about the web. So, as a dutiful reporter, we think we're going to have to watch this again...and again...and again to properly assess the effort and offer you a fair and balanced report. Pardon us while we click the Play button again.

Northwestern Says Wreck Worries, Get Insurance

Looks like Northwestern Mutual realized that marketing is about engaging customers, not just setting impersonal messages out to sail and hoping that small nudge into the big ocean will yield die-hard customers.

Per their own words, the brand "no longer desires to remain reserved and
unassuming." This year they'll be bold and assertive in their communications efforts.

Wreck Your Worries, a calming space where you can characterize your concerns and choose a weapon to destroy them (we picked the golf club), heralds the intro for the new Northwestern. The campaign reminds us that we do take our problems to the office space, and now instead of stewing over them in passive aggressive silence we can blow holes through them with a mase on an insurance website.

A little silly, but we like it.