Get Ready with James Ready 5.5 - Monkey Generator

Here's a whacked, little microsite for James Ready beer that involves monkeys, an image of your face and lots of monkey noises. It's all promoting cases of James Ready 5.5 which are available for $24. Cundari created the work.

Animation Smokes, Cabs Get Ads, Feminine Wash Ingeniously Gross

- For the Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi, Maris, West & Baker has created a new commercial called Candy Factory that teaches children about the harmful effects of smoking.

- Here's a pretty cool promo for MTV2's Sic'Emation animated programming block. The promotions was created by AMP.

- The Chicago City Council has approved taxi cab advertising and 2,175 of the city's 6,900 cabs have asked to carry ads which will be sold by two companies.

- Pittsburgh's Iron City Beer gets Presidential mention.

- Students at the University of Pittsburgh have won the Hinda Fit Marketing Challenge besting 17 other schools. The winning entry may be used in an upcoming campaign.

- We wouldn't know anything about feminine wash products but this ad for Summer's Eve is ingeniously gross.

- Sometimes even the best efforts at removing graffiti are completely pointless.

Manhood Modified At Brawny Academy

In what could be either a genre-busting piece of reality TV hilarity or a horrific cheese fest of epic proportion, Brawny has launched Brawny Academy, an eight episode online reality show in which eight men, sent by their wives, will undergo training to become more thoughtful, more helpful and more romantic. The preview is filled with the usual collection of stereotypically moronic men who think their great husbands when, in fact, they're a bunch of unappreciative, lazy hunks of couch meat. Conversely, it's a collection of men who have been dumbed down by recent society's insistence they dispense with anything remotely resembling manhood and don an air of sensitivity usually reserved for overwrought self-help gurus.

Advergirl reports the series was created by Fallon and produced by Feists and Biscuit's Tim Godsall. Hopefully, this will be more interesting than Brawny's gushing hunk in as earlier online outing, Innocent Escapes.

Non-Sex Poker Viral Better Than Sex Viral

Pokerroom.com has released a couple of videos intended to go viral to promote its services. One illustrates the importance of having a good hand. The other, the sex one (you knew there was going to be at least one of those) speaks to the importance of position. Both are good. The one that talks about having a good hand is the better one though, Yes, we did just say the non-sex one is better than the sex one.

YouTube Hacked...Sort Of

Thursday evening as YouTube added new features to its site, replaced the usual homepage contents with just its logo and the phrase, "All your video are belong to us" which, for a while, had people wondering if the site had, indeed, been hacked. As it turned out, that was not the case as a second message appeared a while later saying, "No, we haven't been hacked. Get a sense of humor."

Ever so insightfully intelligent, YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan said of the stunt, "This is what the engineers do, they have fun with our users. They're all cracking up right now. You have to remember who are fan base is. They don't want some dry message." Julie, you are so right. That's why we have the Bloglines plumber too. It'd be nice if more companies did things like this. It shows the humanity behind a corporation and that an entity such as a corporation can, and should be allowed to, have fun just like normal people do. Thanks to Owen for the screen shot.

Bud Light Photo Contest Offers Trip to Hawaii, Free Beer for A Year

Riffing off its recent "I'm Just Here For The Bud Light" campaign, Anheuser-Busch has launched Here 4BL, a website that encourages people send in pictures of themselves holding a "I'm Just Here For The Bud Light" sign. Pictures will be judged and the winner will be awarded a trip for four to the "Ultimate Bud Light Party in Hawaii. Fourteen weekly winners will receive free beer for a year. Of course, there's already women in bikinis and Hooters waitresses. Anyway, check it out here.

Russell Davies Invents Flickrtising

Marketallica points to Flickr user Russel Davies who's placed a photo of some books on his Flickr page and added notes about the books with a link to Amazon if anyone wants to buy them. Of course, he uses his Amazon affiliate ID number so he makes money if anyone does choose to purchase. Not that anyone wants Flickr overly commercialize but since marketers have taken over MySpace, it makes perfect sense for them to upload images of all their products to Flickr, tag them with notes and add a link to a more detailed product page of to a place where a person could quickly buy the product. Watch it happen. Because you know it will.

Survey Seeks Online Video Usage Among Advertisers

ClickZ columnist Hollis Thomases is writing an article about agencies and online video advertising and she's interested in how those of us in the industry are using video. She's posted a survey here and would love it if you'd spend about five minutes answering less than ten questions.

Old School TV Announcer Illustrates What's Right For Chevrolet

Bringing back the goofiness of yesteryear's advertising, this Canadian campaign for Chevrolet offers the perfect mash up of Ward Cleaver morals and today's penchant for doing whatever the hell we want. Using old school TV style, A Past School Special covers bad influence, peer pressure and principles while promoting Chevrolet's Cobalt, HHR and Aveo. There's a companion website to the campaign and, of course, MySpace profiles.

Yellow Jump Suits, Monkey, '2001' Promote Podcast In Apple Spoof

When you first watch this latest Apple commercial spoof which features a monkey and a guy in a yellow jump suit, "Huh?" will likely be the first word that comes to mind. But, if you check out what's being promoted in the spoof, clefPalate, you'll be treated to a very professionally produced video podcast about cooking...and monkeys...and men in yellow jump suits. Be sure to catch the first episode which riffs very nicely off the Stanly Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey.