Sure, Barack Obama is saving the in-the-tank liberal media by lending his image to various tchotchkes, but did you know the president-elect is also going to reinvigorate the conservative media? Fox News expects to goose its ratings capitalizing on right-wing outrage, and conservative journal National Review is one step ahead: It's already running ads saying that if you sign up for a subscription now, you can stop the godless Democratic pinkos from raising your taxes next year. Staff are deserting the magazine right and left, but apparently it is still confident it can single-handedly foil the Democratic Congress! Watch the hilarious ad, seen on Fox News, after the jump.

Monster.com and CareerBuilder, the two biggest job-search websites, are both planning to spend millions on Super Bowl ads! They want to promote their fancy website redesigns and big plans to get everybody jobs now that there are no jobs left. This economic downturn is leaving everyone laid off, which is a great business opportunity! Or so a lot of people seem to think. But is it really? We have detected a flaw in this largest of growth industries: Marketing to the Unemployed. It seems like a great idea at first. All these people without jobs, and full of desperation! We got a press release for a new "networking" event" called "Get Canned":

If you have a romantic view of the ad industry from watching Mad Men, this may end it forever. Yesterday Agency Spy broke the news that the ad industry had ground to a halt (not just because of the recession) as everyone spent their time forwarding a video showing two ad agency people having sex in an office. We speculated that it would eventually come out. And, well, it did. The video is amateurish, and the sex isn't sexy at all. Think more Pete Campbell and less Don Draper. Use discretion, one and all. We've semi-censored it, but it's still probably NSFW.

With people scraping together pennies for Kool-Aid, all ads harping on the hard times we're having, and coupons making a comeback, things are getting a little stressful for you, the good ol' American consumer. Well, how would you like some Free Cash? Would you? Would you? Would you do anything? Anything at all? Well shake that ass and empty that wallet, consumers, cause corporate America is making it rain! Cash giveaways are the new advertising trend, according to advertising trendwatcher- in-chief Stuart Elliott. Sweepstakes and cash prizes are a paltry sum for big companies, but for The Poors that now make up 87% of our nation, they're the only thing standing between them and cannibalism. The most ironic contest is CNBC.com's Portfolio Challenge, with a $1 million prize for building a successful mock portfolio. If you can build a successful portfolio these days, you're worth a lot more than that.

In an era of TiVo and dying print media, advertisers are desperate for honest-to-God focused attention. Sometimes this results in creepy Minority Report-style ads or cell-phone spying, but now it's produced an essential miracle of modern science: A guy flying across a thousand-foot-deep gorge in a jet pack. (Video after the jump.)

Ad people who should be working are instead talking about a video (currently circulating) showing two ad execs screwing in the office. It hasn't been posted on a blog yet, but it surely will be soon. The lesson: don't record yourself screwing in the office. [Agency Spy]

Floundering maker of autos GM got slammed for flying its executives to Washington on private jets to beg for a government bailout. They were denied, so now they've decided to cut back on every last unnecessary expense. And today, the company announced that it's going to end its $8 million per year endorsement contract with Tiger Woods. Though GM swears that, hey, this has nothing to do with their desperate quest for a bailout—"the timing...is purely coincidental." (Bullshit, judging purely on outward appearance). Where else is the company cutting costs? Everywhere, starting with the paper towels!:

After he won 84 Olympic gold medals in Beijing and celebrated with a firm grip, Michael Phelps got a little screwy with his endorsement deals. He endorsed McDonald's, which made him seem insensitive to fat Americans who don't spend hours doing swimming drills every day, and he endorsed Frosted Flakes, which, you know, ditto. Some of his other endorsement choices came dangerously close to painting him as a nerd. But he's signed on with Subway now—a healthy choice! Screw McDonald's! But this causes as many problems as it solves for Fish Boy:

The aptly named "Our Country Deserves Better PAC" has basically ruined Thanksgiving. They bought airtime, nationally, for some ads they produced about Sarah Palin. Why? Why did they do this? Don't they know it's November and we're all done with her forever? They just don't care. They hate America. "Palin inspires such passion among Americans," the PAC's chief strategist explains, "because she speaks to them in a straightforward and sincere way without the parsed statements and duplicity of typical Washington insider and bureaucrats." She speaks without those "parsed statements" because it is usually impossible to parse her statements. Watch the inexplicable ad thanking that terrible woman after the jump!

♦ Alan Colmes, the "liberal" who supposedly serves as co-host of Hannity & Colmes with Sean Hannity, is leaving the Fox News program at the end of the year. [HuffPo]
♦ A daily news program hosted by Christiane Amanpour is in the works at CNN. [NYT]
♦ Despite screwing up nearly everything he touches, NBC golden boy Ben Silverman may see his contract renewed in the next few weeks. [NYM]
♦ USA Today has announced plans to cut staff. [E&P]
♦ Twilight was No. 1 at the box office this weekend, raking in $70.5 mil. [LAT]
♦ Forbes is not being sold to a shady Russian billionaire. [SAI]

When times get tough and employment becomes a far-fetched hope for many, it's good to know that you can still turn to the Paper of Record to direct you towards the last remaining employers. Specifically, the Central Intelligence Agency. They still need bodies! The shadowy government spymasters are the lead advertisers under the "Jobs" tab on the New York Times' website (the ad clicks straight through to their homepage). There are only two possible explanations for this. Both of them are bad. Conspiracy: The recession has forced the Times' true role as a government propaganda agent to the surface! You think Judy Miller's WMD coverage was a mistake? The paper has been promoting the CIA's position to the publi for years! Open your eyes, people! This ad is but the tip of the iceberg! The Job Market Is Even Worse Than You Thought: I mean, they couldn't even get Wal-Mart or somebody to sponsor the Jobs page? Campbell's Soup isn't hiring factory workers? Clandestine operations in the War on Terror, it seems, are the last place to get reasonable health care coverage. And Jesus Christ, you can't even make 80K for parachuting into Pakistan with a submachine gun to hunt Al-Qaeda. Times are tough.

Amid pandemic media bloodletting and global financial meltdown, it's nice to finally find a silver lining: All those silly Barack Obama trinkets are making insane amounts of money for media companies and providing precious little stimulus to the economy. The Times estimated roughly $200 million sold so far, including more than $15 million in commemorative issues and books from People and Time, somewhere around $1.5 million for the online store set up by the New york Times Company and $700,000 for the Los Angeles Times. Commemorative plates and coins, meanwhile have become ubiquitous enough that Lewis Black ranted about them on the Daily Show (clip after the jump). The downside?

Anonymous subway-based ad remix artist and minor obsession of ours Poster Boy has been caught on film! All we had before to identify him was this photo(shop). Animal NY's vandal-in-chief Bucky Turco spent a nice evening with PB in a Brooklyn subway station, just cold maxing and relaxing and shooting the breeze while carving up ads with an X-acto knife and attacking trains. We now have a definitive description of Poster Boy: a male wearing a hat, doing art. If you see anyone matching that description, call police immediately. (Not really, snitches!). Watch the full clip below:

The financial reports of the New York Times Co. yesterday were predictably awful. Print ad revenue was cratering even before the stock market collapsed, so it's hard to see any turnaround in the near future. And as if the economy itself isn't giving the Times enough problems, they're also dealing with Rupert Murdoch trying to crush them, advertising-wise, in a pincer grip; the Wall Street Journal is falling on their head, and the New York Post is coming right up their ass. Rupert made a lot of noise about taking on the Times directly when he bought the WSJ. But he has a big advantage: another major newspaper in the same market. So while the WSJ is trying to steal away the NYT's high-end advertisers (and succeeding)—luxury watchmakers, Tiffany & Co., expensive liquors, and corporations running "message" ads—the other News Corp. paper, the unprofitable Post, is competing with the Times for middlebrow advertisers and upper middle class retailers in New York City—Bergdorf Goodman, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, car dealerships, cell phone companies.

The Morgans Hotel Group has no plans to stand idly by as the economy crumbles and overpriced, miniature hotel rooms go unsold! The boutique hotel conglomerate launched a new ad campaign, the super-simple tagline for which is on your left. The company started up a new website, too, recessison.com, which, it turns out, is not a reflection on the grammatical abilities of Morgans' marketing staff, but because it stands for "Recess Is On"—or please, please book rooms at our dimly-lit, Philippe Starck-designed hotels and put it to your credit card, even if means you won't be able to pay your AmEx bill at the end of the month. After the jump, two of the videos Morgans uploaded to YouTube to get the silly marketing campaign off the ground.

This past summer, the Evil Food Conglomerates of America agreed to "limit" advertising that "targeted children," though their definition of that is loose enough to keep selling a lot of Pop-Tarts to 13-year-olds. They did this to try to preclude some kind of rule that would outlaw their advertising to children altogether. Unfortunately for the Hamburglar, a new study is out that has people actually talking about banning youth-targeted fast food ads, which would really be an incredible thing. "No fatties," the study proclaims:

Remember in the olden days when pro athletes and Olympians would grace our soft drink ads, urging us to guzzle the nutritionally barren sugar water in order to be a champion like them, cognitive dissonance be damned? Yea, if you listen to athletes now, you are old and laughable. The new (and far more appropriate!) face of Dr. Pepper is a 21-year-old kid who makes a quarter of a million bucks playing video games. Why I never! Lazy kids nowadays! There is simply no way not to sound like some parody of Dave Barry making "these kids!" jokes while writing about this development. But what you need to know is that if you have skills with a Wii controller, you better watch out for the geek paparazzi:

We've been hard on Common, the "conscious" Chicago rapper who spends an inordinate amount of time making ads for damn near everybody and then coming up with weird justifications for how he's still keeping it real. Now his new TV ad for Zune, the off-brand iPod that Common called "a representation of me," is out. And he's pulled godfather of the beat Afrika Bambaataa into the advertising web along with him! This, along with The Roots signing on as Jimmy Fallon's house band, is pounding my capability for sincere outrage into a sense of zombie-like acceptance. Watch the full ad below and surrender:
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[via Adrants; pic via]

The nifty technology of TiVo is killing the advertisers that subsidize free television, which is why TiVos are so widely used by greedy socialists such as yourself. The friendly Domino's Pizza corporation, however, has figured out a way to work with TiVo to both enrich themselves and serve you, the lazy American consumer. Aren't you tired of having to push buttons on a telephone to summon a pizza to your doorstep? Well there's no need to exercise your pudgy fingers any more! Because now when you try to skip over a Domino's ad, it will automatically give you the option of ordering a pizza through your TiVo. This is a breakthrough in ease of service to our nation's cheese-laden bellies:

Haven't we warned you people that Twitter and all of its attendant microtrends are nothing but trouble? That also goes for "the internet" and "bloggers," and especially for "mom bloggers," a particularly virulent and dangerous subset. Corporate America has now learned this lesson the hard way. The outrage of Twitter moms has forced the big bad Motrin corporation to pull its totally innocent ad campaign for aspirin. Power to the people! Detect the horrible offense here for yourself: