Fruit Massacre on Hard Lemonade Makes for Entertaining Pastime

Hard lemonade beverage-maker VEX has a new ad that mashes Hostel up with horny fruit and a blender.

Developed by GJP Advertising, the ad commits a sin typical of spirits that think highly of themselves: it's way too long. Note Smirnoff and Tanqueray.

On another tangent, don't you kind of want to get drunk and hack at fruit now?

Lululemon's L'Odeur Leaves Something Lovely Wanting

For L'Odeur, an edible perfume, Lululemon put together this ad that can't seem to decide whether it's Calvin Klein or SNL.

We weren't the only ones who cringed. The PR people didn't seem keen on it either. And we can see why. It's a little ... well, gross.

To be fair, the ending was kind of funny.

Cherry Coke Does Colorful MySpace Page, Back Button Still Useless

In one of the better makeovers of the horrific-looking MySpace, Juxt has created a Cherry Coke MySpace Page Design contest that places the winning design on the MySpace homepage. As part of the contest, there's all sorts of Flashtastic goodies for people to embed within their own sites, screensavers, wallpapers and all the rest of the usual stuff.

Unfortunately, as with most Flash creation, the browser Back button is rendered useless causing one to continuously back off the promotional page by mistake. Would it really be so hard for Flash to enable or for designers to make possible the use of the browser back button within a Flash page? Or to prevent the entire Flashurbation from also rendering useless the right click menu? Flash can make beautiful things but it also has a nasty tendency to fuck with established web navigation methods.

Decapitation's Not Your Hype? Play Fatworld

Wired conducted coverage of a Web game called Fatworld, which aims - with the couch potato's favorite active medium - to lend insight on the "politics of nutrition."

Fatworld, which comes out this fall, was put together by Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech professor who likes designing snarky little games that illuminate harsh realities. In Fatworld, gamers that make less-than-fantastic health choices can watch their characters bloom with food allergies, heart disease, diabetes and, predictably, death.

Other Bogost games sound equally awe-inspiring. In one called Disaffected!, which came out last year, players pose as Kinko's employees struggling to meet print orders while lazy colleagues make paper-filing errors.

Per a Bogost user review: "I could actually feel myself getting angry and depressed and my sense of self-worth going right through the floor."

Wow. Sounds suspiciously like life. We'll stick with collecting Sheeple blood, thanks.

EMC Goes Mush with Burglar at the Reins

What's going on with this banner ad for EMC? The guy leading that team of dogs looks less like a picturesque Jack London hero and more like, well, a jewel thief.

Probably not the best foot to put forward if you're a document protection firm.

Geeky Gamers Find Peppy Persona in Dangerous Digits

This effort is meant to illustrate how the XBox 360 connects to Windows Media Center. When selected, it plays a little video featuring a domestic scenario between the chunky but fancy-free gamer and his out-of-touch girlfriend. Imaginatively, follow-up creative and the website say, "XBox connects to Windows Media Center."

You know that South Park episode where Cartman impersonates Jennifer Lopez with his hand, and then she takes over? This image reminds us of that. We can already imagine the slew of would-be witty gamers blaming wasted days on malicious thumbs.

We'd do the same thing to justify our Candystand abuse and Sheeple harassment (yeah, we're still stuck on that), but unfortunately it's pretty clear that, far from hard-partying alter-egos with fangs, our fingers are all pedants.

Batanga Miami Party Quite Possibly the Best ad:tech Party Ever

During the evenings of most ad:tech conferences, we have to troll around the host city to make sure we cover the extensive party scene each night yields. Not so during the first night of ad:tech Miami. While there may have been smaller parties around town, none likely compared to the scale and quality of the Batanga-hosted opening night party held at the Royal Palm Hotel on Miami Beach.

Quite possibly, this was the best party we've attended in the four years we've covered ad:tech conferences. Firstly, the party planners made use of all the hotel had to offer: two pool bars, one long outdoor courtyard area on which food was served, one upper bar overlooking a pool with white linen covered tables and lounge beds, one conference/club room in which the band Tartara performed and several hallways with food stations. This was no Crobar.

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ad:tech Miami Exhibit Hall Floor Has No More Landing Pages

While there haven't been any of the usual booth babes here at ad:tech Miami, which, some would say is a good thing, we were pleased to run into a fully-dressed team from No More Landing Pages, the group that protested outside the last ad:tech in San Francisco to advance their cause of "increasing online conversions and ROI." Oh, and its also a front for the agency that actually does the work that increases the efficiency of pages: Ion Interactive. Oh, and it's also an Adrants advertiser for all you full disclosure lovers.

People Do the Strangest Thing When No One's Looking

Here's (links after more) some kind of weird video campaign for some kind of weird new HBO show called Voyeur which basically looks like an updated HBO-style take on the classic Jimmy Stewart flick Rear Window. Distributed by Jung Group, the videos are fairly non-nonsensical but, then again, what most people do when they think no one is looking - the premise of the show - can very often be nonsensical. So, we guess it all makes sense.

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Microsoft is Still Not Funny, But We're Down to Launch Balls at Cubicle Cogs

To help drive its mobile effort and maybe loosen the white collar a little, Microsoft puts together Work Wherever, where you can distract some mildly neurotic, unfunny suited dude and even shoot him in the balls. Kind of.

Exciting. Aside from that, ho-hum.

We wish they'd done more with Clearification.