Remember Julie Roehm, the fabulous woman that Wal-Mart hired to be its head of marketing, then fired because she was fucking around with her married subordinate and hitting WM ad agencies up for jobs and being unwilling to become a part of the "Wal-Mart culture" by painting her office grey or whatever? Then she sued them in a huge, public, scandalous lawsuit. Emily Gould dubbed her the "Wal-Mart Ho," which I am too classy to endorse but not too classy to repeat. Anyhow, Roehm is about to become a reality show star! Is she the "next Paula Abdul"? Or just the Julia Allison of advertising?

AOL has launched Walletpop, a personal-finance site; IAC and Dow Jones have FiLife; and TheStreet.com has MainStreet.com. All hope to attract a younger audience to personal-finance news than the conventional stock talk and online portfolios offered by the staid likes of Yahoo Finance and CNNMoney. The bets are wrong both in their timing and their premise. Stockbrokers and mortgage lenders, reliable advertisers during good times, are both ducking for cover and pulling back their budgets. Froth might have sustained these sites a couple of years ago, but not now. No matter when they launched, though, their proponents should have remembered this maxim: Financial advice, like youth itself, is wasted on the young.

The South Carolina state tourism agency has canceled an overseas ad campaign targeting the gays, which used the slogan "South Carolina is so gay." The state will save itself five thousand bucks by not paying for the previously approved posters, which, as we mentioned, read "South Carolina is so gay." This is a true story. [The State via Adfreak]

Are you fond of air travel, but loathe to be out of sight of advertising messages for a single moment of your trip? Sure, they put ads on the airplane tray tables and all through the airport and on the cabs and on the outside of the planes themselves. But are you expected to stand there at the luggage carousel for up to five minutes without seeing an ad pass in front of your face repeatedly? Not any more, damn it! A marketing company is now selling ads on the luggage carousel itself. So it goes by you again and again until you just can't stand it. A good media buy for the Suicide Hotline. [The god damn press release, via Adfreak]

You'd think LinkedIn management, which has made no secret of its plans to take its automated schmoozefest public, would be trying to avoid trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not so. They're aggressively marketing the company's latest moneymaking scheme, LinkedIn Research, to hedge fund managers. The premise: Traders can use LinkedIn to find "experts" with "unique input" on public companies in their portfolio. What LinkedIn marketers delicately phrase as "input," SEC investigators might well call "inside information." And the only thing actionable about the whole affair might be the insider-trading charges that result.

Oh, honestly. Slate and editor Jacob Weisberg stumbled onto a great thing back in 2000 when they began collecting George W. Bush's various verbal slip-ups and mistakes. The complete "Bushisms" was not only a great writes-itself regular feature for the site, it also made a nice book. But now, the Bush era is drawing to a close. How shall they replace their beloved Bushisms? With some bullshit that still makes no sense to us at all, months after they introduced it. Obamaisms. Which are not actually things Barack Obama has said (or even things that anyone, anywhere has said), but... words and phrases that Slate writers have clumsily wedged the candidate's oh-so-funny name into. For no reason. It upset us when it launched in February, and now they are pimping the book. Lord save us, this is the first time we've prayed for a McCain presidency. We're going to re-embed the "widget" below so you can see how mind-bogglingly pointless it is for yourself!

In an odd bit of television, charming-but-unwatched late night host Craig Ferguson invited a fictional author onto his show Wednesday. The fictional author, Stanley Bing, wrote a book about slacking off on the job called Executricks: Or How to Retire While You're Still Working. But Stanley Bing's real name is Gil Schwartz. And Schwartz is actually CBS's head of corporate communications. Meanwhile, CBS's stock is tanking. So this is maybe bad PR, to admit to not really giving a shit about your job? Asked for comment, Schwartz said "go stuff it." After the jump, Ferguson interviews "Bing" about his earlier book on "Bullshit Jobs"—ones that pay more than they're worth. Heh.

MTV has decided to try the novel strategy of actually running some music videos on their network, something that hasn't been seen there since the inception of The Real World. But they've added an annoying, faux-modern twist in their new show FNMTV (ha): not only will they show music videos, they'll provide a place for homemade insta-response videos made by you, the viewer. Sound asinine? Oh, it is. But everybody has something to say and deserves to say it momentarily on MTV. And it has great interactive appeal, especially if you're interested in talking burritos, dimly lit karaoke clips, and an earnest analysis of the Pussycat Dolls by some dude with a beard:

Air conditioning is not just one of the most important summertime problems facing the media. It's a problem facing everyone, because high gas prices are turning air conditioners into machines that burn $100 bills to produce cool air. Stores in high foot traffic areas have always thrown their doors open in the summer and blasted the AC, knowing that sweaty people will come in and browse just to get out of the sun. But now that strategy is not only hugely expensive, but bad PR as well; environmentalist customers will whine and complain and call the city and organize boycotts. An intrepid NYT reporter finds that wanton AC-wasters are centered—like the media—in SoHo:

"A toy being sold over the internet by a Utah couple is causing an uproar from supporters of democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. It's a sock monkey wearing a suit with a lapel pin for Obama. Supporters of Obama have been filling online forums and blogs with angry words over what they see as the degrading depiction of a black man as a monkey." [abc4.com] News footage of the offending doll after the jump.

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is much better at heroically rescuing orphans from warzones than he is at writing a regular political column, has a very great and original idea. He thinks that Barack Obama, who is now the Democratic nominee for president, should write and deliver a speech about gender, much like he did about race, that one time. What a great and original suggestion! We loved the idea when some HuffPo lady suggested it back in April, when Slate ladies suggested it for Hillary in March, when Ellen Goodman suggested it in May, and we love it now. Unlike all those ladies who suggested it, though, Kristof has manly suggestions for a manly speech on gender issues.

An amazing, real item on sale at K-Mart now: "These athletic pants boldly proclaim just where she stands by pointing out that 'True Love Waits' in a large screen print on the front and back of these pants." Abstinence: It's right there on her ass. Click through for the colorful varieties you can order for your teenage daughter:

Hey kids: you think Catholicism is all about musty old churches and child-molesting priests? Think again, yo! Everything that you think is cool came from a man named g-o-d—including blunt-smoking gangster rapper Snoop Dogg. Deify him! But he's not the only one of you young peoples' false idols who came from the Godmeister. That's right, Sienna Miller did too! These two ads from the Australian version of Marie Claire are supposed to promote the Catholic Church's upcoming World Youth Day. 1-8-7 with a gat in your mouth, Jesus! Gaze upon the full versions of two [REAL] horrifying ideas of youth outreach:

Sears is a company that has become almost entirely redundant, is outflanked by competitors on all sides, and stands ready to poison the reputation of the financial genius who last bought it, Eddie Lampert. The store is not as cheap as Wal-Mart, not as good as Macy's, and not as convenient as Amazon. It's an old retailer desperate for a revolutionary change to resurrect it from the grave. So how is Sears going to claw its way back into the competitive fashion market? By hiring LL Cool J to start a clothing line for it, of course! This is such an appropriately crappy idea:

The US media takes a lot of crap from people like us for being amoral, craven bottom feeders. We take a lot of crap ourselves for being sensationalist controversy-chasers. But all of us here in the American mass media can pat ourselves on the collective back and say: at least we never took sexy pictures of scantily-clad models posing in the rubble of an earthquake that just killed 100,000 of our countrymen:

Turner Entertainment is experimenting with bringing contextual advertising to television. We all know and love contextual advertising on the internet—it's how Google controls your mind, after all—and we're excited to see the concept finally ported to the idiot box. Just think, the utterly inappropriate and often offensive juxtapositions of content and ads we know and love online will soon be an inescapable reality on our TVs. [NYT]

Its pretexting heyday may be over, but HP is apparently still not adverse to a little telephone trickery, as its pending patent for Text-to-Speech Conversion with Associated Mood Tag shows. In it, HP touts the use of VoiceXML to have a fake 18-year-old salesgirl register her disgust with customers who don't respond to offers.

We hope you people are happy. Harvey Weinstein is going to ruin Fraggle Rock and it's all because you didn't elect Hillary Clinton. [Observer]

When massive corporations decide to come up with a new slogan, they almost always end up with something short, trite, and massively expensive. Citigroup just unveiled its earth-shaking new slogan "Citi Never Sleeps," which is a reworking of its classic "The Citi Never Sleeps" tagline. But didn't they just spend $30 million last year launching a different slogan? Well yes, but that one didn't work out, because it sounded like it came straight from the mouth of bottom-rung redneck comedian Larry the Cable Guy. Derisive laughter is appropriate here: