How did all those shady mortgage companies get America's finances all fucked up in the first place? By using the freakish amount of publicly available data about all of our lives to target those people who were the most needy, vulnerable, and ignorant, and reel them into unsustainable debt. Now that everything is screwed up, how are financial companies going to pull us out of this mess? The exact same way! Data mining is going just as strong as ever, and all these credit card and loan companies are really trying to bring in new customers now that their last round of customers have all gone bankrupt. Even the big credit rating firms like Equifax and Experian make huge money slicing up all of the information they have on everyone, classifying us into little demographic groups, and selling it to third parties who can then send disturbingly well-targeted (or just disturbing, period) pitches. One woman got dozens of credit card offers congratulating her on recently emerging from bankruptcy. Other people get letters from random companies that show how much the balance is left on their own home mortgage. Someone should be punched for this. Possibly these people:

What has Mark Penn, the scandal-plagued strategy guru for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, been up to as of late? He's back to doing what he does best: conducting useless marketing research. The "2008 Presidential Image Power Survey," conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland and Landor Associates, asked voters to associate the presidential candidates with various brands, including "fictional spies, retail outlets, snack foods and cars." The answers? Voters connected Obama to BMW, Google and Target, while Mr. McCain was compared to Ford, Wal-Mart, and AOL. Translation: Obama is associated with cool stuff; McCain makes people think of a car company about to go bankrupt, a big-box retailer that abuses its employees, and an Internet company that peaked 11 years ago. [AdAge]

Campbell's Soup is suing a New York restaurant for putting up an entire wall full of pictures of Warhol's famous soup can image, which Campbell's says wrongly implies the restaurant is "affiliated" with the soup company. Warhol's ghost laughed and laughed and laughed. [P6]

In the same way people thought television and movies and the invention of thumb-twiddling would kill the radio industry, people were convinced the iPod would be the thing that pulled listeners away from commercial radio forever. But they failed to anticipate how utterly lazy and uncultured Americans are! Radio gained millions of listeners last year; young people's time listening to radio rose 11%, while their time listening to iPods dropped 13%. The whelps love Bubba the Love Sponge, or whoever is on "the dial" these days! So then why can't radio make any money?

The Tivo users among us have decided that they no longer need to watch television commercials, but rest assured that their unpatriotic fast-forwarding will not go unpunished. The entire advertising industry in now engaged in nothing except figuring out how to make TV viewers watch ads whether they want to or not. The most popular method is to try to turn commercials into "shows" themselves, or mix up advertising and actual content so much that you have to watch both. But CBS is raising the question: what if the advertising and the content are equally annoying?

Here's what you can expect in the coming year, internet lovers: lots of young internet companies going broke. The ones you love! Including, but not limited to, user-generated video sites, ad networks, fringe social media sites, and companies that make all those sweet apps. Why? Because in our brave new economy, companies are slower to buy bullshit ads of questionable efficacy on every random "Web 2.0" site. How bad will it get? We'll tell you: Ad Age predicts a small amount of growth:

It's not just porn companies, beauty salons, hotels, action figure makers, and costume manufacturers cashing in on Sarah Palin: Manhattan Mini-Storage has managed to find a way to get into the act, too. [Politico]

You may have noticed that a large percentage of flat surfaces in America are currently occupied by those vaguely enraging tri-panel HSBC ads, where identical images are given different captions to prove that—I suppose—HSBC does not believe in a Kantian sense of moral absolutism. "A child: Love. Responsibility. Welfare Fraud." Now the bank is sponsoring this week's entire issue of New York magazine, meaning you'll have more than a dozen new chances to soak in HSBC's triumvirates of relativism. But considering the timing, it's worthwhile to ask: "Banks sponsoring entire issues: Smart. The Future. Monumental Fuckup?" This issue has been "in the works for several months," meaning that the bank sure as hell didn't know it would be running in the midst of The Great Depression Pt. 2. HSBC says it's all very "timely and appropriate." Mm hmm. Regardless of the intent, the real question is, is this sort of thing wise? With a bad economic outlook for advertising in general, publications themselves certainly hope so. Banks are mostly wandering trying every possible ad strategy right now—from comedy to doomsaying—in search of something that's effective. They don't really know what to do. Shhh! But! The one thing we know is that the proliferation of media makes it increasingly hard for advertisers to get their messages out. So buying all the ad space in a magazine or on a website is probably just going to gain favor as a tactic. They just need to make sure they're not buying it in something that's about to fold. That would be embarrassing. [NYT]

Are you a weary office drone who chokes down a dry, overpriced sandwich from the local deli in front of your computer every day, wishing that you could take a full hour to relax and eat some quality food for once in your miserable life? Well the ConAgra corporation feels your pain! And in order to help you they've enlisted someone you, the little people, can look up to: Ivanka Trump. She is using a modern "blog" to reach all the depressed, overworked potential ConAgra lunch customers! It all began last week, when Ivanka, daughter of The Donald and main squeeze of The Jared Kushner, informed the public via some blog that she would soon be setting up a "lunch trade" to revitalize your boring existence:

In-the-tank ad industry people have, in a Time "The Person of the Year is YOU"-style ripoff, named Barack Obama "Marketer of the Year." He even beat out Zappos.com. Wrap your mind around that, America. [Ad Age]

Well Kanye West, we've got to give it to you. In the past we've mocked you for your blog, your anti-hippie rants, your comical self-importance, and your muppet show. But that was before you filled a room with dozens of nude women as a backdrop for your record release party. Critics who enjoy nude women loved it! Here's how these creative, out-of-the-box tactics worked for Kanye and his media friends—Nakedness below:

Suze Orman is, essentially, a hustler. It's not that she necessarily gives bad advice—it's that she sells the idea that anyone needs Suze Orman to give them advice in the first place. Here's an example: the strongly-haired CNBC personality wrote a book called Women and Money. You know what women need to know about money? The exact same stuff that men need to know. Stuff which is primarily available for free, on the internet. Like "don't spend money on books full of facts available for free elsewhere." Unfortunately, Americans are more seduced than ever before by Suze Orman's steely gaze. She's not your friend! During the total economic meltdown of our nation's financial system, who do people turn to? Suze freaking Orman. She's now the face of FDIC, for god's sake. She may not be as dangerous as her closest competitor, mad man Jim Cramer, who actually gives specific advice that will cause you to lose your life savings. But she's insidious nonetheless; if people want financial advice, they definitely shouldn't turn to someone who's really an ad pitchwoman.

Just this week, I saw an NYC subway train plastered with ads on the outside of the cars for the first time, up close. And you know what? It's not that bad! Kind of new and exciting and eye-catching, like graffiti used to be, except less so. That sentiment will wear off within a week or so, and the ads will recede into the category of tiring visual assaults on our collective serenity. Too bad, because more and more and more are on the way, everywhere!: What else could they possibly sell for ad space on subways? Well, how many flat surfaces are there? —Panels in trains. —Billboards in stations. —Total wraps of the exteriors of subway cars —Stairs. —Turnstile structures. —Turnstile arms. —"Digital screens inside stations." —Digital projection ads on interior station walls. —"A large display, almost the size of a movie screen, mounted above a passageway by the 7 train in Times Square." —L.E.D. displays on the interior walls of subway tunnels that make the "windows light up as if there were a television screen outside the window." Commuters willing to sell forehead ad space, please contact the MTA. [NYT]

They're already wrapping subway cars with ads and covering tray tables with marketing messages. Why not just cover every square inch of planes' interiors with pitches for Claritin and Tide detergent? Why not, indeed. A handful of US carriers are now planning to increase revenues by putting ads on bathroom doors and overhead bins. [AP]

Medusa Hair Salon in Brooklyn is now offering a "Updos for Obama" special: You come in and get a Palin-like hairstyle, and they'll give the $75 price you would have spent at the salon to the Obama campaign. Less partisan (and much more stupid) is what the Westin Times Square has cooked up: Between now and Election Day, the hotel is giving a free glass of champagne to women who come in with a business card bearing the title of "vice president." [TONY, HotelChatter]

Oh America, when will your bothersome Puritanism stop infringing on The Weinstein Co.'s movie marketing efforts? First the MPAA banned the poster for the upcoming Kevin Smith flick Zack and Miri Make a Porno, on the grounds that it was too blowjob-y. So they changed the poster to one featuring simple stick figures. Sorry, whores of Hollywood Babylon, that's not enough to protect our children!: Ads for the movie are being rejected across the nation! Boston ads drew complaints. Philly banned them altogether. And in Los Angeles, the dastardly marketing scheme is preventing children from understanding a baseball strategy in which a runner on third base breaks for home as the pitch is thrown and the batter simultaneously bunts, which can pay off in a run unless the batter misses the bunt, in which case it's almost surely an out at the plate:

Though she's a newcomer to the internet, Tina Brown has spent a lifetime honing her ability to self-promote. Which is how the former Vanity Fair editor seemed to have instinctively grasped what was expected of her last night on the Colbert Report: sell the sizzle, not the steak when it comes to her new internet venture, the Daily Beast — and remember that no points are deducted for going a bit over the top, per the self-parodying bloviations of host Stephen Colbert. When it came time to discuss the Beast's central role in getting Christopher Buckley fired from National Review, Brown couldn't just say the incident was exciting — no, she had to claim it turned the whole office into a party! Lest anyone think she was joking, Brown again mentioned how much the firing thrilled her a few breaths later. Brown, who has herself done away with plenty of magazine writers, may be learning the nuts and bolts of the Web on the job, but her gleeful, shameless bloodlust may yet reveal her as a natural for the medium. For proof, click the video icon to watch the attached clip.

When Radiohead unveiled the then-breakthrough gimmick of letting anyone pay whatever they liked to download its In Rainbows album, opinion was pretty much split between those who thought they had discovered the future of the music industry, and those who thought that nobody in their right mind would pay more than $0.01 if they didn't have to. Well, now the (approximate) sales figures are finally out:

When times were good and the economy was strong, you could sell companies any old kind of patently ridiculous ad. Did marketing savants really believe that spending wildly to place their brands inside "The Sims" was going to pay off in money that is made out of paper, and spendable here on Earth? It's doubtful. They just got caught up in the sheer newness of plastering their logo anywhere and everywhere, and then made up some bullshit about "branding" to explain the expense. Well that shit is over now, suckas! The first thing to get cut in everyone's ad budget was "experimental" ad buys, random things like branded pop-up games and ads in Virtual Worlds and other, mostly online things that probably never worked in the first place. Also getting chopped: mobile ads that go straight to your cellphone—which not only don't work, but actually annoy the consumer in the process of not working.

Lord, America is going to be forced to raise itself up from this economic crisis just so that we don't go insane from the repetition of advertising slogans about it. It was tolerable when just banks were running "Wall Street meltdown? We can help!" ads, because, you know, they're obliged to say something. But within a few short weeks even candy stores and home builders were using it as a creative crutch, and now it appears there are no ads left in America unrelated to "these troubling times": HBO. Crate & Barrel. Brooks Brothers. Denny's. Equinox. Even Mary-fucking-Poppins. All are running recession-themed ads, like some ill-informed country relative who fills all awkward pauses by repeating what they saw the other day on the tee-vee.