Gawker contributor copyranter sent us this photo of a new Steve Madden billboard, and our initial thought was, "Hey Steve, you realize those girls walking around Queens Plaza aren't part of some real life 'Derelicte' campaign, don't you?". But as it turns out, Queens is the birthplace of the Steve Madden brand and, according to Madden, "the new New York" (not that this helps explain the Long Island City reference in any way).

Of course, it would take a marketing flack named David Berkowitz to offer guidance on squeezing dollars from death while dodging questions of bad taste. After noting that some online advertisers pushed to grab keyword searches for "Cory Lidle" merchandise after Lidle's plane crash, placing targeted ads for Lidle/Yankee products next to content discussing his death ("That may or may not be offensive."), Berkowitz goes on to cite several cases of high-dollar Lidle merch for sale immediately post-crash. He concludes, "That can, at least in my book, justify some advertising even after a tragedy; the consumers have spoken." If anything, Berkowitz faults outlets like eBay for insufficient enthusiasm when cashing in on Lidle's death, dismissing their Lidle ads as "too generic." He tries very hard to coin the phrase "ghoulish boom" for this effect, and we might approve if it didn't represent turning a negative into a positive with no shame whatsoever (see also "viral marketing").

This year, Donny Deutsch, the biggest douchebag in the advertising industry, started "writing" a Gotham magazine feature for the Napoleonic-complexed Jason Binn, the biggest douchebag in the magazine industry, ingeniously titled "Deutsch Mark" (a quick copyright search finds that "I Suck The Ass Of An Ass Beast" is also unclaimed, Don). The gig has ended up being, quite blatantly, a monthly one-page advertorial for Deutsch's trailblazing CNBC show, The Big Idea.

From an Italian ad campaign for a store-wide 30% off sale at bookseller Mondadori. Their DVD section also has a beautifully remastered version of The 280 Blows.

• This may very well be the worst charity ad ever. [London Evening Standard]
• Oprah Winfrey gives Hearst Tower a handjob, calls it "out of the box." Yeah, it's that kind of morning. [NYO]
• Not even Times Square is safe from Bill O'Reilly. [THR]
• If you work at Time Inc. you should probably start boxing up your personal belongings now, just in case. [WWD]
• David Brooks is a terrible human being who will select whatever "facts" conveniently support his glib, tendentious arguments without regard for consistency. Also, he's a bad Mets fan. [NYO]

Sure, coming up with ad slogans for U.S. Army recruitment in wartime — especially this wartime — can't be easy. But you'd think that for $200 million a year, ad agency McCann Worldgroup could have come up with a better replacement slogan for "Army of One." Though perhaps "Army Strong" builds on the unmitigated success they had with the "Fire Bad" campaign created for Frankenstein's monster.

So have you seen those Versus ads around town? Two blank spaces in which you're supposed to write your own opposing teams or whatever? (We're not quite sure, which is not a good thing for an ad campaign, is it?) Anyway, as the picture above demonstrates, some ideas are best left unapproved.

At the risk of becoming a mere marketing arm of the Smirnoff folks (Smirnoff folks, get in touch with our ad people!), we're sharing this with you: It's "Tea Partay," the musical version, and, actually? If the invitation we posted earlier came to life, it would be exactly this video. It may have been bouncing around the web for a while, but our day wouldn't be complete without giving something back. Rock out with your polite WASP term for the male member out.

From a Paris bus shelter. Those stylish French ... even their graffiti'd critiques of Kate Moss could be easily mistaken for a legitimate fashion campaign blurb.

The lies you are about to read are, actually, not at all well-disguised. That's because there is no disguising the bare-naked bullshit of New York real estate advertising. But, how does one justify charging 1, 2, THREE mil for two small empty rooms? You just have to make pretend you're selling units of Kubla Khan's pleasure dome and adjust your use of language accordingly. "Renovated" becomes "luxury." "Cheap marble" becomes "couture." And "Jade Jagger" becomes "designer."

Since we got to enjoy photographer Terry Richardson's take on Vincent Gallo earlier, why not also enjoy Richardson's new "Lolita" ad campaign for Lee Jeans in Australia? Sliding in for approval under Ozzie decency regs, the photos depict barely legal gals in baby-doll getups and various nymphet scenarios. Inevitably, the shirtless, tattooed, wholly off-putting figure of Richardson himself sneaks into various frames, though perhaps not all of those actually used in the ads. When we were coming up, kids wearing Lee Jeans routinely got beat up by kids wearing Levi's; apparently those Lee Jeans dorks were all having crazy kinky sex in motel rooms while their creepy uncle looked on.



Lee's Lolita OK, board rules [The Age via Adrants]

If you read the print edition of the Post you'll have seen their recent series of ads touting the new functionality of their website. Recently, the campaign shifted gears a bit: Rather than forcing readers to confront the frightening sights of Mike Vaccarro's jowl-concealing goatee and Andrea Peyser's sour "nun who just caught you masturbating" face, the paper is now relying on testimonials from actual customers. Works for us: Nothing makes us want to check out a website faster than Vinnie from Elmhurst's seal of approval.

• David Hasselhoff is just exhausted, so much so that he fell asleep during a televised interview. He says he hadn't been drinking, just popping ludes. [AHN]
• Bobby Brown faces arrest after failing to pay child support to the mother of his first child. Considering his gravy train just filed for divorce from him and he's asking for cars instead of appearance fees, we're thinking that cash isn't going to be showing up anytime soon. [Reuters]
• The Chinese can be relied upon for two things: food and spit. Regarding the latter, Animal magazine is looking for your spitting-Asian pictures, presumably for some sort of expose of the saliva-flecked streets of lower Manhattan. [Craigslist]
• After finally agreeing to count cab drivers, New York's population is revised upwards to 8.2 million. [Crain's]
• The U.S. finds a new method of torture: having detainees at Guatanamo eat 4,200 calories per day. [AP]
• After all that crazy Jew-starving, what's better than a cookie and a Frappucino? [AOPJLH]
• Chevrolet is SO FUCKING AMERICAN. And Stephen Colbert, don't steal that line. [Jalopnik]
• Know your downtown hotels and avoid them. [HotelChatter]
• Wait — bloggers aren't above the law? Crap. [USA Today]
• Jason Calacanis unfamiliar with common male desires, libido, and/or heterosexuality. [Valleywag]

The relentless pursuit of scoop/exclusive credit is a die-hard pastime on this, our Internet. At Gawker, we tend to prefer a more squishy concept of content ownership; information wants to be free, or at least infinitely reproducible without cost, man. Nevertheless, we do try to provide credit where credit is due, and that's the subject of a witch hunt by the greasy gearheads at Jalopnik. Seems they managed to con some exclusive pre-release Chevrolet commercials out of General Motors, though unfortunately the "final" commercials did not feature the promised nuclear explosions. They did feature lots of patriotic imagery and the heartland musical stylings of John Mellon Cougarcamp, which apparently appealed enough to Stephen Colbert and The Colbert Report that the show reproduced the video with no thanks to poor Jalopnik. "When a journalist or 'web logger' takes something not their own and slaps a pre-roll on the front of it with their name and puts it up on YouTube, that's as good as if they made it themselves," claims Jalopnik righteously. Typical mainstream media, surviving parasitically on blog content, just like always.

October 3, 1995, 1:00 P.M. EST. Where were you when it happened? I was in a midtown studio with J.K. Simmons recording a radio spot for...garbage. J.K. was the voice of billion dollar trash company BFI. While I'm still writing garbage every day, JK has moved on to better things. But this day is not about J.K. It's about O.J.

So we're not 100% sure, but, close enough for blogging and all that: There's an ad that's been popping up all day on Yahoo Mail that seems to feature everyone's favorite party photographer, Mark "Cobrasnake" Hunter (top left). The other faces in the ad look like some of the lensman's subjects. It's a promotion for T-Mobile's new "myFaves" program, a service which "allows customers to call any five people free regardless of the carrier they use." The plan is part of T-Mobile's attempt to peel off users of other services; we had no idea that the douchebag demographic was so valuable. Either that or they're trying to tap the youth market.

"You know what you should be thinking? Think Lower East Side. No, hear me out: A year ago, it used to be totally dirty and unsafe, but now there's a Starbucks and some shops that were listed in Lucky and even an all-organic boutique, so it's okay to go down there. Yeah, yeah, there are still some Asians running around, but they'll work at the new hotel or something. But that's not what I'm saying, man — I'm saying that the place is perfect, you know? There's life in that area, real characters running around, real grit and dirt but not, like, so dirty that we can't take the models down there. No, seriously, I've found this totally retro tenement where we can shoot. It's a fifth-floor walkup, but once you get up there, it's worth it 'cause it's, like, so fucking real. We'll even grab a local and throw 'em in there. Shit, this campaign is going to MAKE US. Totally street, totally DKNY."

From Gwyneth Paltrow's Africanness to Kate Moss's blackness, miscegenation is pure advertising gold these days. Check out these ads from Spanish telco Telefonica, showcasing the best international calling rates by way of a charming biological hybrid between two particular nations. From left to right, it's Senegal and Germany, Japan and Scotland, and Turkey and Sweden. Something tells us that, at least in Turkey-Sweden's case, the carpet doesn't match the drapes.

Earlier today, a glance at the New York Post website might have yielded an unusual scenario. On the website's right margin, the usual raft of pointlessly animated mortgage ads was occasionally interrupted by a subscription-shilling tower ad for the rival New York Daily News. Clearly an indelicate transgression by the ad server; or perhaps Post owner Rupert Murdoch just wants to look magnanimous.

Over the weekend, city spas were booked to the gills with ad execs getting deep tissue neck massages in preparation for this weeks' self-fellating proceedings: Grab your cocks and Paul Smith socks! It's Advertising Week 2006!