It's like the story of rise and fall of American hubris itself: once upon a time, in the heady days of 2005, Procter & Gamble decided that consumers would not be satisfied with a mere four-blade razor. So they launched Fusion, which boasted five blades and an embedded mini-vibrator, so that American men could enjoy the closest shave in the free world and then pleasure their wives, secure in the knowledge that Osama bin Laden is a hairy bastard shivering in a cave with no sex toys or women, so there. But our shaving pride came before the fall! Now that the US economy has collapsed, all these terribly expensive five-bladed razors are, like Hummers and Steve Schwarzman's birthday party, sad symbols of a nation gone astray. But they still need to sell all these god damn $25 packs of Fusion razors! [WSJ]

Tina Fey's 30 Rock is perhaps the most critically-acclaimed show on network television (and about network television), an arch meta-comedy about the production of a fake sketch comedy. But maybe the show's writers are too good at their jobs — and too willing to please NBC executives on whose whims the ratings-challenged comedy will live or die. New York talked to a variety of industry players about the clever way 30 Rock integrates paid product placements from the likes of Verizon, Snapple and women's beverage SoyJoy. Some, like Oz creator Tom Fontana and film-producer-turned ad man Charles Rosen think the show handled the product insertions in such a brilliant, self-mocking fashion that it lit the way for other shows to so likewise. Joss Whedon, the beloved creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, said that may be precisely the problem. He took particular umbrage at miniature episodes 30 Rock ran inside American Express ads:

Oops! Citigroup's marketing department had already started running ads announcing the purchase of Wachovia when it found out this morning that the bank was backing out of the deal and selling itself to Wells Fargo instead. [AdAge]

"We all know insurance is dull," announces this ad for Trident, which is apparently an actual insurance company in the UK that sells legitimate insurance, and not just some viral front company. To offset said dullness, Trident's new commercial is nothing but 85 seconds of bikini-clad models bouncing up and down on pogo sticks, filmed from the most porny angles possible. Also, a few slogans are thrown in! Honestly, it's left me too dazed to really be able to sort out whether it's despicable or...brave? It's certainly not clever, per se. Perhaps one more ad with male pogo models would head off the impending backlash. Watch it below and consider its sociosexual implications:

Google is, like, everywhere. It tells you how to find everything. It runs everything on the internet. Happily for human sanity, Google maintains its status as massive dark lord of information without running a huge amount of normal consumer advertising, or plastering its logo over every bus stop and baseball stadium. Because the company is smart enough to know that if it advertised at a level proportional to its scale, everyone would get sick of it. But maybe Google's changing its mind!

Fox Business Network ran ads in the Times and Wall Street Journal this week mocking rival CNBC for showing informercials during a heated weekend in the middle of the Wall Street meltdown. Fox concluded: "We own this story." Not quite. Financial panic did grow the year-old cable network's tiny audience to the point where it could be rated by Nielsen for the first time. But the results won't add any swagger to the step of Fox News chief Roger Ailes: Fox Business peaked at about 81,000 average viewers. During the same period, when Congress voted on the banking bailout Monday, CNBC averaged nearly 900,000 viewers, the Times reported this morning. It appears Fox will need to sweat it through many more weekend shifts to catch up — and pray for a bit more panic, for good measure.

Chevy's new promotion on college campuses: "giving free rides to students who will be filmed via the interior 'Cab Cam.'" Then all the videos go on the web, and the one that gets the most views wins you a new Chevy. In other words, "HEY GURL FUCK ME IN THE BACKSEAT AND WE GET A CAR." [via Adrants]

Gandhi is my homeboy. And yours! Let's figure out this ad campaign together. The slogan: "Life is easier if you don't speak up. Debate." Naturally you can see how the whole theme develops from that point. You can't see (I'm willing to bet) what the hell this campaign might be promoting, but hey, that's something you can "debate." After the jump, see Gandhi cookin' out, Mandela chillaxin', and the Dalai Lama ready to hit some serious slopes, screw the politics yo!

This is reportedly the (real) first post-collapse ad from failed bank WaMu, and it's very... direct? "WaMu has a bright new future, thanks to the stability of JPMorgan Chase (and their nearly trillion dollars in customer deposits). [ETC.]" says the fine print. The failed institution deserves credit for confronting its massive failure. Although the ad would have been more appropriate in grey. Do not fail to click to enlarge. [Change Order via AgencySpy]

♦ Rachael Ray's mammogram is scheduled for tomorrow. And you'll be able to watch it go down if you tune into her show. [NYDN]
♦ The New Yorker just issued its endorsement of Barack Obama. Bet you're really surprised. [NYer]
♦ CNBC hit an all-time record the day the Dow dropped 777 points. [MCN]
♦ ABC's lineup of new shows isn't off to a very good start this season. [THR]
♦ Why Microsoft's ads with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld was a flop and Apple's "I'm a PC" ad has been a success. [AdAge]
♦ Newark's Star-Ledger is hanging on, but barely. [AP]
♦ As the economy turns south, marketers are turning up the volume and going after their competitors. [WSJ]
♦ Donna Tartt is leaving Knopf for Little, Brown. [Galleycat]
♦ The new, ad-covered subway cars... revealed! [NYT]

Much has been made of all the embarrassing commercials for financial institutions punctuating all the news coverage of said financial institutions' simultaneous collapse. (cf. AIG's "Strength To Be There.") But this hypnotic marketing masterwork touting a small Italian takeout chain is the commercial of the collapse. It runs on CNBC approximately 3,894 times a day if you're a local Time Warner customer. Last night I heard it in a dream. Narrated by someone who obviously used to work in phone sex, it channels the Id of the distressed investment banker. Over and over and over. In a voice so preposterously orgasmy she could just straight up be saying "Hey bankers, you will gain a per capita average of 17 pounds stress-eating shitty Italian takeout as you work hundred hour weeks under the constant threat of being 'downsized' along with your rapidly evaporating net worths" and it would still be pretty effective and also, a lot cheaper than a whore.However it is not as good as the IO Digital Cable commercial.

Oh good, more attack ads! Not in politics—in the cutthroat world of soup. As we newly poor Americans gather our last remaining pennies from our decimated retirement accounts, hitchhike to the grocery store, and head for the soup aisle to ponder what watery concoction can best momentarily quiet our growling bellies, marketers are more determined than ever to ensure you pick their cheap concoction above their competitors'. So they're running ads savaging rivals like Progresso and McDonald's who are just wrong for America:

The MTA is facing a projected budget deficit of nearly $900 million next year. So how is the agency planning to raise some extra cash? By wrapping subway cars in ads, that's how! That means that in addition to the ads you usually see inside the cars (not to mention on the platforms and in stairwells), now the exteriors of subway cars will promote slip-and-fall lawyers and TOEFL classes, too. Actually, the first ad, which will be unveiled later today, won't be quite that low-brow—it's for the History Channel. (The photo to the left is from Stockholm.) But just think of how unappealing it will be to stand on a subway platform and see a train roll into the station with a 23-foot ad featuring the beaming face of Dr. Jonathan Zizmor.

The new ad featuring Johnny Rotten selling Country Life Butter is out for you to watch. Then destroy things. [Guardian UK]

Viral video may be dead, but that doesn't mean that the whole concept of the "viral" campaign has disappeared. It's just moved on to newer, more annoying creative formats. And now viral campaigns don't even need a corporate sponsor—agencies are doing them with the mere hope of attracting a corporate sponsor. Advertising apocalypse, or creative marketing? Or maybe both? An agency called General Projects launched a site called Schtock.com that basically shows cut little mashups of stock photos. Everybody assumed it was a viral campaign for Corbis, the stock photo company. But actually GP did it on their own, and then took all the attention it generated and went to Corbis like, Hey, hire us, we can get you attention like this! So far Corbis hasn't done it. [via Adrants] So, waste of time, right? Unless you consider pics like these art, in which case, good job of making internet art. Ultimately the agency probably will get business off this clever stunt, but let's hope the idea doesn't spread. We have enough viral shit as it is without people doing it on spec:

Kevin Roberts is an important ad agency CEO, which makes one wonder why his blog is all about how he loves Hugh Jackman, Italy, and rugby. George Parker's theory: because Roberts is the "world's most pretentious douchenozzle."

Ha ha, wow, has the management of the Wrangler jeans company all been kidnapped and tied up in a closet, causing the company to be run currently by French anarchist intellectuals? Because that is my operating theory. First Wrangler—Wrangler!—set off its just plain dumb "We are animals" campaign with that cult-like hipster photo shoot by Ryan McGinley. Now (southern accent) Rain-guhlurr, proudly headquartered in Greens-bruh Nawth Cair-Lyna, has a commercial with some French guy talking about "Why do we live when we know we will die?" Uh, to watch NASCAR? Watch this abomination after the jump. Riots amongst Alabama denim fans TK:

"Most banks are grey," read the colorful little tagline on Washington Mutual's website last week. "That's just not our style." Then WaMu catastrophically collapsed, ha. After the jump, their new homepage ad now, which is just so perfect that I demand you click through to see it:

The online-ad network market is clogged with startups; most are bound to fail. But no death may be greeted with more joy than Jellycloud, the latest incarnation of Gator, a startup whose software was caught spying on users. A tipster tells us Jellycloud, with 36 employees, went under this weekend, with liquidators repossessing their furniture. A hard death, after a questionable birth.Gator had changed its name to Claria, and raised some $40 million to launch a personalized homepage which never caught on. In the sneakiest move of all, it then raised $11.5 million under a new company name, JellyCloud, with the same set of executives as Claria — Scott Vandevelde and Scott Eagle among them. Was Jellycloud just Claria reborn? It's now a moot point, if our tipster's report is accurate. And a painful mistake for US Venture Partners, SoftBank, Sand Hill Capital and Crosslink Capital — who have managed to lose $11.5 million in just five months.

Poor children in Asia: they're eating trash. Sad, poor street children, with only trash for food. Sad. Helping them to at least get some Kool-Aid is surely a worthy cause. Does that mean that you must use trash bags shaped as ghoulish little child bodies in an ad campaign to raise (sad) awareness? Yes. Yes it does. (Obviously not in New York City, where we put in children in trash bags for fun). Click through for another pic of how to save sad poor children via bodybags: