Microsoft is dropping Jerry Seinfeld's nonsensical ass from its massive ad campaign, which they say was, you know, always the plan! The company is actually dubbing the new ads in its $300 million campaign, debuting tonight, "phase two." (Couldn't think of anything slightly less evocative of the Death Star?) The company line is that the "Seinfeld and Bill Gates do the robot" ads were just teasers, and now the real informative spots start. But fuck that; the new ads sound easily just as weird: The "theme" of the new spots is the standard, vapid "Windows. Life without walls." Whatev. And Microsoft has decided to fight back against all those vicious Mac ads by co-opting the phrase "I'm a PC." In the new ads, you will see: a John Hodgman doppelganger, and "everyday PC users, from scientists and fashion designers to shark hunters and teachers." And, of course, more random celebrities!!

With Jerry Seinfeld gone, Microsoft's new ad campaign will become an aggressive response to Apple's Mac vs. PC ads, with actress Eva Longoria, singer Pharrell Williams, author Deepak Chopra and a slew of what the New York Times calls "everyday PC users, from scientists and fashion designers to shark hunters and teachers," proudly proclaiming "I'm a PC." In one ad, a Microsoft engineer who looks like John Hodgman, the actor who plays PC in Apple's commercials, will the commercial: "Hello, I’m a PC, and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”Experts told the New York Times the campaign reminds them of how rental car company Hertz finally responded to Avis's slogan "We’re No. 2. We try harder," with a campaign that declared: “For years, Avis has been telling you Hertz is No. 1. Now we’re going to tell you why.” But for me, it just brings to mind that old clip of an angry Larry Ellison responding to a reporter asks him "what's new about what Microsoft's doing." "What's new is nothing's new," Ellison says.

The ad industry is perfectly confident that this whole "meltdown of the US economy" thing will be but a blip on their radar. Uh, as long as you weren't on that AIG account. The broke ass insurance giant has (wisely) decided to pull all of its corporate advertising for the remainder of the year, which will save them slightly less than 0.1% of the $85 billion they now owe to you, the taxpayer. More importantly it will save them the absolute humiliation of the ads themselves, in which a little tot can sleep safely knowing that his family has AIG and its "Strength to be there." [In debtor's prison]. You won't have to see this bullshit any more:

Sure, the elitists at the Washington Post reported Sarah Palin "Left [A] Trail Of Bad Blood" as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, and local homemaker Anne Kilkenny famously emailed the whole world to say the Republican vice presidential nominee was a "ruthless" city politico. But as the attached clip show, Palin at least started out wanting to spread CHANGE and HOPE, not unlike a certain other politician now on a presidential ticket. "I want to bring a positive energy and determined voice to your ideas," Palin said in her debut mayoral campaign spot, signed "Positively Sarah." The feathered hair and keyboard-and-trumpet score will brighten your evening all on their own! The clip is after the jump.

Remember those awful Microsoft ads with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates? Well, now you can forget them. Microsoft flacks are desperately dialing reporters to spin them about "phase two" of the ad campaign — a phase, due to be announced tomorrow, which will drop the aging comic altogether. Microsoft's version of the story: Redmond had always planned to drop Seinfeld. The awkward reality: The ads only reminded us how out of touch with consumers Microsoft is — and that Bill Gates's company has millions of dollars to waste on hiring a has-been funnyman to keep him company. Update: In a phone call, Waggener Edstrom flack Frank Shaw confirms that Microsoft is not going on with Seinfeld, and echoes his underlings' spin that the move was planned. There is the "potential to do other things" with Seinfeld, which Shaw says is still "possible." He adds: "People would have been happier if everyone loved the ads, but this was not unexpected." Update: CPB confirms that Seinfeld spots already in the can will not be aired.

While doubtless in pursuit of some important story yesterday, angry ad blogger Copyranter came across this adventure in contextual advertising on the dedicated Sarah Palin web page of Alaska's Anchorage Daily News: ads for SHRED ALASKA onsite document shredding. Ha, can they shred Yahoo accounts, ha? A new ad on the Palin page today also seems appropriate, in its own way:

♦ Rupert Murdoch says he has no plans to buy the New York Times. He also wants you to know that Fox News chief Roger Ailes is staying put: "He's not going anywhere. He's very happy. I'm very happy with him. We're good friends and we get on well" [SAI]
♦ Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin is official. [AP]
♦ A day in the life of Brian Williams and Erin Burnett, courtesy of the Observer's Meredith Bryan. [NYO]
♦ Newark's Star-Ledger may go under. [NYP]
♦ Consumers don't actually want to surf the web, talk on their cell phones, read a newspaper, and watch TV all at the same time. [AdAge]
♦ The New York Times will begin providing business commentary from Breakingviews.com. [NYT]
♦ Ariel Foxman is the new managing editor of InStyle. [Gawker]
♦ Ratings for the fifth season premiere of House were down from last year's debut, but Fox still managed to beat the competition last night. [TV Decoder]
♦ Craziest idea ever: Steve Irwin's 4-year-old son Bob wants his own wildlife TV show. [NYP]

"Financial ad spending might be soft over the next quarter or so," an executive tells Adweek today. We were like, ha, might be? "Soft?" Quite a gift for understatement, greasy ad dude. Or so we thought! But the optimistic take on reality is that the burning of Wall Street might not be so bad for the ad industry. In fact for some lucky agencies, it will be a freaking bonanza!

The original movie poster for the new Kevin Smith flick, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, was banned by the MPAA earlier this month because it conjured the terrifying image of Seth Rogen receiving a b.j., which is not safe for kids or anyone else. Now the new version of the poster (pictured) is out: the old "so hot you have to see it for yourself" trick. They still face the problem of having "titillating" and "Seth Rogen" in the same sentence, though. There's no way out. Click through to relive the magic of the banned original, if you like:

♦ NBC's Ben Silverman says he hasn't managed the "unrelenting press attention" as well as he could have, and he's doing better than most people assme, a sentiment echoed by his close pal, Donny Deutsch. [TVDecoder]
♦ Harbinger's Phil Falcone says he has no plans to dump his investment in the New York Times. [Reuters]
♦ MTV is pulling the plug on TRL. [WSJ]
♦ Mark your calendars: Jeanine Pirro's court show debuts next week. [HuffPo]
♦ Current and former staffers at the LA Times are planning to file suit against owner Sam Zell. [LA Observed]
♦ How writers in Hollywood are dealing with the "new comedic landscape." [NYO]
♦ Product placements have earned less airtime on network TV compared with the same period last year, according to Nielsen. [AdAge]
♦ How the financial meltdown will affect Hollywood. [THR]
♦ Jeff Zucker, Mel Karmazin and Steven Rattner weigh in on the state of the media biz. [Portfolio]

Cyrus Mehri is a big time civil rights lawyer who's won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of corporate discrimination settlements, and scared Wall Street and the National Football League into making serious integration-like movements. His latest project: the white-ass advertising industry. A new study found that only 5.8% of advertising professionals are black—a number that should be closer to 10%, based on the demographics of similar industries. And Mehri won't say whether he's planning a lawsuit, but he is delivering a verbal smackdown, oh yea:

The Museum of the Moving Image recently launched what is basically our new favorite website: "The Living Room Candidate," a repository of (embeddable!) presidential campaign ads spanning Stevenson v Eisenhower through Obama v McCain. So, so much fun for political and advertising junkies. Also it is the history of how the United States of America killed itself. This ad will make you cry. It's Michael Dukakis responding to unfair attacks from George H. W. Bush. It's also every loser Democrat since Humphrey. Click through to watch. Click to view [Via Radosh]

Breaking: humongo ad agency JWT's entire New York office has been closed down due to a burst water pipe. Which has reportedly flooded the whole office and damaged lots of equipment. All the account execs are taking the secretary gals down to the bar to do the twist, while Don Draper silently lights a Lucky Strike and slips out for an afternoon fling. [Agency Spy]

The biggest surprise in the news that school officials in Saginaw, Mich. are hoping to sell ads inside their buses? That Google's not behind this effort to market to a captive audience. "Times are hard," one official told AdAge. "The fuel prices are definitely affecting a lot of people, and school districts are in that boat." Schools in Colorado and Michigan already run ads inside and outside buses. Another Michigan school system tried in-bus ads but abandoned the effort after ads from a cell phone provider, health clinic and credit union didn't perform well with the kids. Even now, we're sure that an assistant product manager at the Googleplex is scrambling to cook up a 20-percent-time project to help them out with improved content matching and monetization. (Photo by KB35)

• The premiere of Saturday Night Live with Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin and Michael Phelps as guest host generated the show's best season debut since 2001. [THR]

Remember those risque Gossip Girl posters that promoted the teen soap by using quotes from objectionable reviews, like the Boston Herald calling it "every parents nightmare"? They were fun! And dangerous. And now we have a new quote from the marketing folks to slap up on the ads. It comes from Stephen Baldwin, the bloated born-again brother of superior actor Alec, who delivered a "20 minute rant" at the Family Research Council Action's Values Voter Summit, calling the show "trash" and saying that those OMFG posters were "mocking God." Great line! Our Photoshop guy, Steven Dressler, has put that quote up on our favorite poster, for your and Mr. Baldwin's enjoyment. Click for larger.

The gays have always been an attractive demographic for advertisers because they're generally affluent, have more disposable income (fewer babies!), and tend to be more reliable early adopters of trends than slobby straights. So all-American brands love to get on the gays' good side. As long as they don't have to directly market to them, because under Man Law that would make them homo by association, and their sales in Texas would absolutely plunge. But times have officially changed, cowboy; Levi's is going straight to the gays with a gay ad campaign on gay TV network Logo with the gay message: Levi's loves gays enough to get dirty at 3 a.m.! In their new "Unbuttoned" campaign that has the unfortunate side effect of employing Perez Hilton, Levi's is sponsoring the entire 1-3 a.m. programming block on Logo on Sunday mornings. Market research on Logo and a bit of deduction tells us exactly who Levi's is going after at 2 a.m. after a long Saturday night: lonely gay people who live not in cities, but in more isolated outposts of suburbia with fewer opportunities to connect with the gay community in person. And how will Levi's demonstrate its special understanding of this under-served demographic? By giving them shirtless guys and dirty jokes:

Money is burning in New York! The economy is crumbling in the heartland! It's not just the poor bankers who are going broke now; it's the cities where they live. And the cities where they don't live, which were broke to begin with. Michigan towns are already reduced to selling ads on their school buses. Could any municipality possibly be more desperate than that? Yes, New York City could:

It was just last week that Microsoft unveiled their new advertisement featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates hanging out in a shoe store. Shockingly, you rubes failed to comprehend what this had to do with computers and PCs remained firmly on store shelves. Well, perhaps this latest opus will change all that. In today’s installment Bill and Jerry deign to hang out with regular people in the suburbs. It may be a little less weird than their previous outing, but it’s certainly longer—in fact, it’s a whopping four and a half minutes! We’ve excerpted a choice 30-second cut, but you can watch the entire thing here. If this baby doesn’t get you to put down that Mac and climb aboard the Vista train, nothing will. [YouTube]

Simplicity—which often involves leaving things unsaid—is a rare tactic in advertising today. We want every bell and whistle listed and explained for us completely and quickly so we can get back to playing Wii! Political ads are no exception. Here's Barack Obama's newest ad attacking McCain; it takes the trouble to spell out, on screen, the same things the announcer is saying, because Americans have lost our ability for inference along with our attention spans. It lacks three crucial things that the classic 1964 LBJ ad, titled "Merely Another Weapon" (after the jump) has: One clear message; a trust that viewers will understand that message themselves; and awesome atom bomb blasts: Click to view [LBJ ad via The Living Room Candidate]