'Animal' Relaunches, Snark Immediately Follows

Animal Magazine, the yardstick by which all New York culture is measured, has re-launched its website blog-style. Already, Animal's got high-jacked Facebook pictures of Moby hanging with a bunch of college hotties, a nod to Chelsea's apparent fixation with the male appendage and one of New York's finest mouthing off as only the finest can.

Senator Kennedy Whakamoles Cape Wind Project

No doubt there are a multitude of political angles to Cape Wind's desire to place a bunch of giant windmills off the coast of Cape Cod the generate energy but this video from Greenpeace showing Senator Ted Kennedy paying whakamole with the windmills because they might alter the pristine view he has from his Hyannis mansion is, well, just funny. Apparently, Kennedy has buried an amendment into a Coast Guard bill that, if approved, would kill the Cape Wind project.

iTunes to Carry Graphic Ads

Ad Age is reporting iTunes will ad small graphic ads to iTunes in the lower left hand corner of the screen. The ads will appear when a person listens to a podcast using iTunes. It's unclear yet whether the ads will appear when people are viewing paid content such as ABC's $1.99 downloads. What is clear is the lower left hand area of iTunes will soon become ignored territory.

Oh, and by the way, Ad Age, that auto page reload thing is cheating and a sad attempt at increasing pageviews.

Behavioral Targeting Whoops Contextual's Ass

A recent behavioral targeting vs. contextual targeting study on an Internet advertising campaign for Panasonic found behavioral targeting identified and reached 50.3 percent more imminent buyers of Panasonic plasma TV's than contextual targeting. The study, by Next Century Media using Insight Express across 1,146 respondents, also found the cost to reach each potential buyer was 50 percent less than contextual targeting.

When considering a plasma TV purchase, people on the receiving end of the behavioral targeted ads showed a 67.6 percent higher preference for the Panasonic brand than those reached by contextual targeting. The study also showed a 168.9 percent advantage for behavioral targeting over run of network in terms of increasing the likelihood of buying the Panasonic brand.

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John Malkovich Excorcizes Naomi Campbell For Pirelli

As we mentioned back in January, Pirelli would be releasing a BMW Films-style long form commercial. Well, it's out. Directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring John Malkovich and Naomi Campbell, it's got everything you'd expect from a Hollywood-created long form commercial: pretentiousness, overly dark and moody lighting, slowly mounting tension, credits that roll almost as long as the film itself and even humor. In the film, Malkovich must excorcize demon Naomi Campbell out of a suffering car that has tires that won't stop squealing and just aren't up to the job of controlling the car's devilish powers.

If you can keep yourself from laughing while Malkovich throws water at the devil-car while screaming "the power of Christ compels you" Exorcist-style only to have the car nonchalantly cast the holy water off with its windshield wipers, you'll appreciate the final scene in which Malkovich solves the cars problems by...well...just watch it. The entire film, whether it sells any tires or not, supports and aligns perfectly with the Pirelli tagline, "Power is nothing without control." You can view the film here.

'American Dad' Fights 'Family Guy in Game For DVD Release

To promote the launch of the American Dad DVD, Fuel Industries, for Fox Home Video, has created an advergame that pits American Dad against Family Guy Kung Fu-style. Visitors can play as six characters (Peter, Lois and Stewie from Family Guy, Stan, Klaus and Roger from American Dad) with two more to be introduced soon. Special moves include Peter lighting his farts on fire and vomitting, Lois decaptitating people, and Roger bitch-slaps people. Also, there are nine different playing environments. The game boss is Ryu from Street Fighter 2. Soon he'll become one of the fighting characters as well. While we suck at gaming, we still like the tons of different ways you can play this game and the sheer weirdness of it.

Weinstein Company Uses YouTube to Promote Movies

This isn't really new but it's worth noting The Weinstein Company, formed last October by Miramax founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein, has embraced the whole social media/online video thing and is promoting its movies on YouTube. Deep Focus handles the account. Up now are two trailers for Lucky Number Slevin, a trailer for Clerks II and, just added, a clip that includes the first eight minutes of Lucky Number Slevin. There's no need to rely on a studio website or movie trailers in physical theaters when you can get your trailer hundreds of thousand of additional people as in the case of Clerks II which has, to date, been viewed 217,505 times. Of course just one showing of one trailer on one day across, say, 2000 theaters with 150 theater-goers gets 300,000 views but hey, they're getting 217,505 more views then they might have had they not posted the trailer on YouTube.

Wachovia Championship Promoted With Online Golf Game

Carat Fusion's John Szczur tells us, "One of the most challenging holes on the PGA Tour, the 17th hole at the Wachovia Championship held at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, NC. Carat Fusion developed this flash game to promote Wachovia's sponsorship of the annual tournament as well as create a viral marketing buzz for the Wachovia brand." We tried it and aceived par. Not bad, if we say so ourselves. Give a whirl.

Wacky World Cup Commercial Gets Wacky 'Fanimal' Site

To accompany its wacky TV commercial, Rexona, makers of Sure deodorant have launched a football fan site to coincide with the FIFA World Cup in Germany this summer. Just like in the commercial, in which animals go crazy, the site encourages visitors to create "fanimals" or crazy football fans.Once they've created these fanimals, they can be uploaded to appear in a version of the commercial. Of course, there's prizes too. A Klaxon horn and a digital camera.

Shopping SIte Adopts Wiki Format

Just launched ShopWiki, a search engine that crawls 120,000 stores to create its index of products, is using the anyone-can-edit Wiki format for the site's buying guides. In this manner, we suppose ShopWiki has jumped into the social media space. While it's not that different from a bunch of Amazon reviews, the Wiki is a single, ever changing document as opposed to a collection of individual comments/guides written by users and manufacturers. While we do like the concept of this shopping meets blogging concept, we wonder just how fluid we want our product information.

ShopWiki claims its search engine, which crawls the retailer's site rather than relying on a data feed, is more accurate and can provide better results to complex queries. Currently in beta, ShopWiki plans to go global in Fal 2006.