This morning outside Penn Station, some young fellows were distributing fake anti-promotional literature "protesting" the new high speed Europe rail system. (Paris to Frankfurt in under four hours!) First of all: Ooh, fake negative ad campaign. Second: Are commuters from Lynbrook and Bayshore really the target market for RailEurope promotions? (Paging Long Island's Atoosa Rubenstein!) But really we're not sure they can afford the exchange rate. And finally: Why is Europe fucking with us and our asstacular and sad—yet pridefully, pants-pockets-tearingly American!—trains? Fine, so Luxembourg to Paris is 231 miles and their new train takes 2 hours and 5 minutes; Manhattan to East Hampton is 103 miles and it takes nearly 3 hours on the LIRR. But unlike France, at least we have our international reputation to keep us warm at night. Oh and we get to drink Coors on our trains, so there.

94 years ago, liar H.K. McCann launched his NYC ad agency with the slogan "Truth Well Told." That was a big fat lie. Advertising copywriter Copyranter brings you instances of advertising lies and the lying liars who sell them.

This week, AdAge got adman Donny Deutsch to present his "Big Idea" about the Don Imus imbroglio. Double D says it's a "moment in time—the end of an era." Our country "is ready and begging to be a less hateful land. Jerkiness, snarkiness, screaming, yelling and taunting are tired and old." Deutsch then highlights some of his own jerky snarky past. But! He leaves out at least a couple of noteworthy instances.

While many advertising campaigns allow themselves to fall into the trap of complicating their pricey, well-produced web shorts with frills like plot and dialogue just because they've landed some A-list endorsement talent, Campari's online "Hotel Campari" effort deserves credit for the elegant simplicity with which it delivers its message: "Famous ladies with big tits love our booze."

Let us begin with the cover of Portfolio. It's a gilded city image, a metropolis of lit-up office windows in earth tones, oddly, as it is supposed to be an homage to Berenice Abbott. (A funny reference, as she was told that New York City was too toxic for her to live in and so she left.) Publisher David Carey and Editor in Chief Joanne Lipman are shown in the Times this morning comparing their cover favorably to a recent Fortune cover, with Carey saying, "We're not giving you peas and carrots. We want to capture that glamour." By that measure things are certainly already a success; the magazine certainly weighs as much as Glamour.

94 years ago, liar H.K. McCann launched his NYC ad agency with the slogan "Truth Well Told." That was a big fat lie. Advertising copywriter Copyranter brings you instances of advertising lies and the lying liars who sell them.

You might have seen in Variety that Dana Vachon's Mergers & Acquisitions has been acquired by a film production company "in a deal worth high six figures." (Related: Our Emily Gould is in the bathroom right now, bringing up an amount of vomit in the high six liters.) You might also have noticed, as we did when we rolled out of bed this morning, that Mergers & Acquisitions, a book that we have been prattling about regularly, is being advertised on Gawker today. We have also found out you might also see some sort of sponsored contest here for it tomorrow. You might have some questions about advertising and editorial on Gawker. So might we!

94 years ago, liar H.K. McCann launched his NYC ad agency with the slogan "Truth Well Told." That was a big fat lie. Advertising copywriter Copyranter brings you instances of advertising lies and the lying liars who sell them.

Great news on the race front: An African-American man, long known for his servile demeanor and non-threatening appearance, has attained a position of responsibility and respect in corporate America.

94 years ago, liar H.K. McCann launched his NYC ad agency with the slogan "Truth Well Told." That was a big fat lie. Advertising copywriter Copyranter brings you instances of advertising lies and the lying liars who sell them.

Working in advertising always seemed depressing, but wait! Publicis employees, you're in luck! Tomorrow, New York magazine is swinging by your office—as they are with a whole bunch of other offices in town—to take pics for an "Office Life" photo essay, and all you have to do is act NATURAL. Act natural, Eric Cosper! Yeah that's right. Just like that. Yeah, baby.

Great news, ladies! It's not enough that you must look slender, dewy, and always-fuckable on the outside. Madison Avenue wants to make sure that you're insecure about your insides as well. The Wall Street Journal notes that:

94 years ago, liar H.K. McCann launched his NYC ad agency with the slogan "Truth Well Told." That was a big fat lie. Advertising copywriter Copyranter brings you instances of advertising lies and the lying liars who sell them.

94 years ago, liar H.K. McCann launched his NYC ad agency with the slogan "Truth Well Told." That was a big fat lie. Advertising copywriter Copyranter brings you instances of advertising lies and the lying liars who sell them.

94 years ago, liar H.K. McCann launched his NYC ad agency with the slogan "Truth Well Told." That was a big fat lie. Advertising copywriter Copyranter brings you instances of advertising lies and the lying liars who sell them.

Irish singer Bono's (Red) campaign—you know, the thing besides guest-editing July's Vanity Fair that Bono's doing to help bring awareness to the plight of African AIDS victims—got slammed yesterday in AdAge. The mag got all bitchy on the discrepancy between the estimated $100 million for marketing and the campaign's $18 million gleanings. (Red) didn't like that so much!

• Wal-Mart is really, really sorry that they taped a Times reporter's calls. They don't want you to think they're Hewlett-Packard or anything. [NYT]
  

There's a new ad campaign designed to convince Europeans that, due to our crappy exchange rate, New York is a cheap place to visit. But that's not all:

94 years ago, liar H.K. McCann launched his NYC ad agency with the slogan "Truth Well Told." That was a big fat lie. Advertising copywriter Copyranter brings you instances of advertising lies and the lying liars who sell them.

• MTV names reality TV queen to head programming. Expect lots more pimping and punking! [MediaPost]
  

Google is amping up its Adsense offerings with embedded video clips from sources such as Dow Jones & Co. and Condé Nast. A variety of revenue models are being explored, but the basic deal has Google sharing ad income in some proportion with the video content creator and the hosting site; ads are arranged around the video and occasionally inserted between clips, as each video box has a mutli-clip "playlist." Contextual relations between the clips and surrounding material is pretty thin, but no worse than most contextual ads. More interesting is what this could mean for other video creators, should the system's economies scale down as well as up. With a small amount of judicious oversight, even the vast wasteland of Youtube content could be leveraged into embedded clip boxes to punch up boring site content elsewhere, perhaps creating a Revver-style payment scheme for Youtubers.