Shoot-The-Hottie Paint Ball Game Promotes Movie

Here's a fun time-waster that falls into the shoot-the-hottie category. Called School For Scoundrels: Fight Dirty, it's an online paint ball game to promote the movie School for Scoundrels that lets you shoot paint balls at guys, girls or an image of someone you upload into the game.

GM Fires Production Line Robots In Super Bowl Commercial

Here's some GM Super Bowl commercial leaky leak that, if we're understanding the commercial correctly, claims robots won't build cars anymore because they aren't as good as humans. Hmm. Can anyone imagine a GM production line staffed entirely by humans with no assist from those cool, yellow robots? i guess we'll find out during the game.

UPDATE: The robot has...drumroll please...a blog!

AHA Buys Super Bowl Time, Sidesteps Product

After spending $4.2 million on a couple of spots in the uber-competitive ad orgy called Super Bowl, you naturally want some serious run for your money. But not everybody takes the expected measures to ensure an ROI.

Adrants reader Roy points us to this interesting story about the American Heart Association, who paid the Super Bowl invoice and dropped still more cash to produce light-hearted cautionary piece "Heart Attack," then did something odd: they neglected to mention the product, heart drug Altace.

"I don't think it is appropriate to have some guy in a white lab coat staring into the audience saying, 'You are going to die if you eat another chicken wing,'" says Rebecca Sroge, executive VP and managing director of Glow Worm, the agency that created "Heart Attack."

more »

Match.com Says Love's for Everybody, Even You

Match.com's Make Love Happen campaign pushes the notion that there's a match for everybody, no matter how quirky or off-colour. The lively prints come courtesy of Serge Seidlitz. Well, we said we were all for the unsexy in a primarily sex-driven industry so this is what we get: sexless Lego pieces in an Erect-a-Set city.

Check out a pink variation of the ad here. It merits a close look as there are a lot of details. Whether it will draw attention to said details is a story only time will tell.

Mini Knows Who You Are and Is Putting it On Billboards

Mini Cooper marketers Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners get savvy with billboards that talk to cars. RFID technology in Mini Cooper keyfobs get picked up by billboards which then reflect that information in little messages like "Hey Bill" and "Nice convertible."

Check out the video here. We're impressed but creeped out, not least because if people still wonder whether Big Brother is watching, this would be an appropriate time to suspect that yes he is. And he approves of your taste in cars.

Mini users not in the RFID loop can sign up for it at the Mini website. You'll be asked a few questions about your private life. Try not to let slip the awkward BDSM fantasy about your boss unless you want it aired 200 feet above you.

Anti-Ad Agency Makes Ads Against Ads

Appropriating ads and turning them into fuck-the-man messages is not actually anti-advertising. It's turning an ad into another (granted, irony-rich and possibly more sophisticated) ad.

While like Mortarblog we have serious doubts about the Anti-Advertising Agency's claim that "city dwellers see 5,000 ads per day," we agree that the world out there is oversaturated ad-wise. But in an ideal world, that raises the bar for us - not to become more ostentatious with our messages, but to make them more slow-moving and subtle. In an ideal world, anyway.

We dig what the Anti-Ad Agency's trying to do. It's important to ask questions about the presence of ads in our daily lives. But isn't that what this whole consumer-gen thing is all about? It's our strong suspicion that, short of finding a society bent on ridding themselves of ads, what they truly want are ads on their terms and not The Man's. That's okay with us.

Mini Yo-Yos Precariously Over Heads of Potential Purchasers

Agency BBDO Italy is to blame for this fiberglass life-sized Mini Cooper that actually does bob up and down like a yo-yo. We like Mini's forays into the whimsical to illustrate its compact size and playful personality, but the fact that it's slightly more wee than a regular car probably doesn't comfort those driving under the billboard.

More images here.

Discovery Channel Rewards Dirtiest Jobs in Sweden

It's not often you're rewarded for your dirty fingernails. Discovery Channel Sweden aims to change that with Dirty Jobs, a contest for consumers who have the filthiest jobs imaginable. A winner is picked each week for five weeks, and each gets 1000 Euros to spend on a vacation away from the latrine they're wallowing in.

The contest is promoted on custom printed toilet paper, courtesy of Miami Guerilla Agency in tangent with Discovery Channel's Zenithmedia. At the outset we considered trashing the firm for being just the umpteenth to think wiping one's ass on the company logo is a good idea, but we find the use of toilet paper apt for their purposes. Right now big contenders for the prize are nurses, pig farmers and heavy divers. It might do well to enter Chuck McBride into the mix, as he seems to be the only one happily at work in his plasma-splotched mass murder scene of an office. Oh wait, he left. Never mind.

It's Bigger. It's Better. There's More to Touch

It's bigger. It's better. It's voyeuristic. There's no harness. It's smoother. There's more to touch. There's less crying. There's no waiting to get in. It pumps you up. It can never be too big. It's more satisfying. No, you perverts, we aren't sharing with you that second time we hooked up with that cute freshman red head in the back of the parent's station wagon. It's Comic Con, silly. More precisely, a video that expresses just how much more fun it is to go to the comic book convention Comic Con a second time. And yea, it's the well-worn "let's make it seem like we're talking about sex but not" approach but it still works. Maybe that's because the topic of sex never gets tired. Oh wait. Maybe that's just us. Sorry. Pardon the interruption. On with your work day

Bics So Permanent they Reincarnate with You

Adpunch points us to this clever campaign by Bic, who's attempting to break into Sharpie territory by pushing its own permanent marker.

Premise: that Bic sticks so well the ink will follow you into your next life. Copy: "Permanent. Even in your next life." We can only imagine what kind of guy the frog was. There's a snake variation too.

This reincarnating ink thing is something we've never considered before, and it might actually yield the answers to questions we've had for a long time. Like, perhaps the inked "MONKEEEEY WAS HERE!!!!" scrawled all over our ass is not from a drunken night we don't remember. Perhaps it's from a previous life as a less responsible person. That takes a big weight off our minds.