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The average blog addict must ignore over a thousand ads a day, especially ads in the canned style of the Blogads network. So on the one hand, it's impressive that the Alltel phone company earned the Wall Street Journal's attention with an easily missable string of ads.

On the other, this is the most oblique ad campaign to ever hit the blogosphere. Alltel is running spoof ads urging people to sue it. The ads link to a fake legal site filled with background that has nothing to do with Alltel.

The spoof anti-site is a tired reverse-psychology viral marketing trick, but in Alltel's case, it's carried out to ridiculous lengths, with a roster of fake web pages long enough to impress the Lost marketers or Da Vinci Code alternate-reality gamers.

The spoof pages are funny — the references to the "ever-encroaching Acronym Industry," "Melaninally-Challenged Americans v. TAN-acious Sunless Creme, Inc." and "increased national standards for elasticity in gentlemen's dress socks" make the site read like an early draft for a Douglas Adams novel.

But what good is this to Alltel? After all the jokes, readers haven't actually been pitched anything — and that's fine by me.

Alltel Spoofs Itself in Online Ads, But Not Everyone Gets the Joke [WSJ]