Best of the Worst CES Ads Highlighted

Shake Well Before Use points us to Engadget's collection of the best of the worst ads seen at this week's CES conference. Predictably, one involves word play on big boobs. Check them all out here.

Penn Farm Show Promotes Wares with Butter Bus

Butter is important.

What, you don't believe us? You clearly don't live in Pennsylvania, where it serves as a crucial vehicle for grade school transportation.

Piers Fawkes Says Change World or Go Home!

In a less threatening take on the "--or die!" manifesto marketers have become so fond of, Piers Fawkes suggests that if you're not going to go out there and change the world, you ought to just go home.

At the IIR Future Triends '07 conference on Monday, Fawkes gave this presentation -- pointing to Kashi, and that Omnivore's Dilemma guy, as well as other examples -- to illustrate what trendy forms our social assumptions about "going green" take.

"Green is not a trend, it's an issue," he stressed, adding that ours is the best job in the world because we can inspire companies to do good.

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Commercial Closet to Honor Absolut, AmEx for Gay Efforts

Absolut Vodka and American Express are receiving AdRespect honors for appealing to the gay community in their ad efforts for about 40 years, combined.

Commercial Closet, which is bestowing the honors, is debuting the "AdRespect scores," which is a new industry standard for judging LGBT corporate marketing efforts. Scores go from 0-100 in terms of how well, and how often, a firm advertises to the gay community.

Honors go out at 8PM on November 15th at the TheTimesCenter in NYC. The New York Times will be hosting the event.

Check out spots by Absolut and American Express in the Commercial Closet archives. The print effort at left isn't an official Absolut ad, but it's also in the archives as a representation of the brand's longstanding friendliness toward the community.

Goodyear Ditches Dirigible, Obscures Roads Instead

This Thursday Goodyear plans to announce its official sponsorship of the Philadelphia Marathon. And because blimps possibly lost their luster after blimp lover (and, um, embezzlement king) Lou Perlman fled the scene, the company plans to help runners "get there" with a branded Philly marathon rig, which you can see in all its glory here.

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Facebook Ad Announcement Leaves One a Little Wanting

Yesterday Facebook unveiled its online ad plan to New York advertisers hither and yon. Here's the scheme prematurely hearkened as a contender to AdWords: advertisers can make their own branded pages!

For free!

And that's not all.

You can also buy banner ads -- LINKING TO YOUR PROFILE PAGE!

Overwhelming? Something like that. But it would be wrong to say Facebook disappointed its masses. It did toss in an analytics feature, after all, and friends can actually endorse stuff they recently bought, which then appears in news feeds.

That last part might be the most meaningful aspect of the announcement. If there's anything the inception of WOMMA taught us, it's that word of mouth has been a wildly underrated resource that fuels the success of any company. Our industry has been hard-pressed to generate WOM in a way that doesn't alienate buyers -- or worse, ring inauthentic.

So kudos to the Facebook team for thinking outside the box. We'll see how this simple idea affects the online ad mix.

Agency Life Making You Twitchy? Game On!

Ever have one of those days where you just snap and kick the living shit out of something? Chances are you've had a few over the past few months, and so have your other agency chums.

Riester has an elegant solution: kickball! Check out the video for the Riester kickball tourney, which happens tomorrow. The spot is loaded with situations that will motivate your kicking leg.

This actually brings a spark of life into the room. Kickball is one of the few games we'll actually get off our asses to play, alongside four-square, double-dutch and tetherball.

Target Gets Holographic With Grand Central Fashion Show

Next week, Target will host a fashion show November 6 and 7 at Grand Central in New York City. The fashion show will be model-less and automated with holograms which will "walk" down a runway. We hope the models who likeness were used to create these holograms got their fair share of green. We wouldn't want Target to be targeted (yes, we did just use a lame pun) by the United Models of America or something over royalty payments or whatever the fashion industry calls them.

Target expects over a million people to see the event in addition to web and mobile viewing. And, just so people don't miss the event, Target has set up text messages to remind people of the event and to send video to their phones.

Japan's Best Butts Celebrated in Triumph-Sponsored Ass Off

Delivered with nary a wink, Reuters' Ian Sloan provides news coverage of Japan's Triumph-sponsored Show Me Your Sloggi Contest. Sloan's dry statement, "consumer priorities are shifting to different assets," leads to a woman explaining how everything has been done to breasts to make them more attractive and noticeable, interests are now shifting to women's backsides.

Triumph and Sloggi are well know for their cheekishly exploitive (did we just say that?) tactics for moving lingerie off the shelves. From No Smoking bras to Sloggi's pole dancers to Tiger bras to Sloggi's endless collection of stunts, the two companies are, for sure, fixated with the female ass.

Though very far from the likes of true ass queen, Vida Guerra, Kaho Watanabe is doing her best to uphold Japan's bottom line.

Coffees of Hawaii Jump-Starts Triathletes with Caffeine-Laced Beverages

We may always go "eh?" upon seeing one of its campaigns (observe one and two), but the Coffees of Hawaii marketing department is always actively putting coffee in people's hands, and that's admirable.

Coffees of Hawaii debuted its Kona Nightingale coffee at the 2007 Ford Ironman World Championships in Kailua-Kona. Athletes were given little cups of iced espresso out of a floating bar in the week preceding the race.

Hrm. Athletic exertion + icy espresso. The formula for heart failure?

It's definitely memorable.