Pfizer went through a huge hassle earlier this year when some touchy public health types pointed out that the company's main spokesman for the cholesterol drug Lipitor—artificial heart inventor and Skeletor look-alike Robert Jarvik—was not actually a doctor, although the whole $250 million ad campaign was premised on him touting his medical expertise. So the company has regrouped and come up with a dynamic new spokesman: a regular guy, just like you! Which goes to show how unnecessary the Jarvik fiasco was. If the company had gone with either "regular guy" or "actual doctor" in the first place, it could have saved itself millions in marketing costs and months of downtime in this multibillion-dollar fight for worldwide drug supremacy. But why not live on the edge? After the jump, soak in the misleading-ness of an old ad featuring the non-practicing Dr. Jarvik:

As you would imagine, it's hard enough for TV networks to come up with marketing campaigns for all their new shows every time the fall season rolls around, because most of the shows are doomed to be failures. Which ones? Hopefully not the ones you, network marketing person, came up with the campaign for! Promotions are always a balancing act between enthusiasm and tempered expectations. But this year the networks are having a slightly different problem: they don't even have enough material on many new shows to make ads for them. Thanks, writers' strike!

So this is what Barack meant by "it's about you." I feel so used!

The president of a venerable Montreal retailer is pulling some 450,000 of the the store's catalogs because he decided the models were too thin. Says Peter Simons of La Maison Simons, who claims he was on vacation when the catalogs were printed: "We are into social responsibility here.... I'm fully aware of what it is and I'm taking full responsibility… It's my job to ensure that we are a constructive actor in the community. I should have done better. I should have seen it." Well, holy overblown contrition, Pete, it's not like you asked the models to watch you masturbate like I hear is the retailing executive custom up there in Montreal! In any case, this is the most emaciated-looking picture I could find on the internet from the La Maison Simons catalog — its private label is called "Twik" — so for good measure thought I'd go back and upload my favorite pic from the pages of that other great publication and crusader against eating disorders, Teen Vogue.That's more like it!

Hm, how to grab shoppers' attention in the cavernous Mall of America, without having to pay some kid $7 an hour to stand there passing out fliers? A hologram man, sent from the future! It's only a matter of time now until Terminator-like robots patrol our nation's food courts, gesturing menacingly with their whirring appendages, their fixed gaze wordlessly urging you to check out the new Sears bathmat sale at the price of your life. For now, though: Best Buy employee holograms. Watch the ghostly salesman give his ever-repeating spiel, below: Click to view
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Remember the days when every college campus was not a giant mall? Extra credit: remember when the average college campus had nary an Abercrombie & Fitch? Today's Wall Street Journal's story on that ubiquitous flip-flop brand's "buzz"-generating bonanza at five lucky college campuses* just gave us rush of nostalgia for the olden days. Remember how mercifully impossible it used to be for the average communications major to procure a pair of Tory Burch flats without leaving the Green Zone representing the 500 yard radius of the Theta house? Because college campuses were the rare tracts of land in America where the demand for dumb consumer goods and belogoed status branded articles of clothing seemed totally out of whack with the supply? Yeah well, those days = over!Once upon a time retailers shied away from college campuses because they didn't know how to deal with the four months of the year business would be totally dead. Mercifully, sometime in the nineties many enterprising college presidents pinpointed "detestable materialism" and "abiding love for conspicuous consumption" as two of the primary traits in the psychological profiles of the average overprivileged young high school students they coveted or at the very least wanted to apply to their institutions for the sake of pushing down the acceptance rate, and they forked over some of their endowment zillions to offering kickbacks to companies like Urban Outfitters and Barnes & Noble. My old campus even has an American Apparel now! Still, some retail chains found the whole "summer" thing to be a problem. So for them, the nation's institutes of higher education worked out a deal: open a "pop-up" store! Kiehl's and Havaianas and Victoria's Secret Pink are all doing it. They open mini-stores or stands for a day or a month and then pick up and leave! For some reason, according to the Wall Street Journal this is causing controversy. "We don't want our faculty and students overrun with commercialization," says University of Florida school spokesman Steve Orlando. Oh Steve.

Is iTunes helping the music industry—or destroying it? That's the dramatic question we will answer for you in this post. Itunes is the single largest retailer of music in the US, period. It sells nine out of every ten digital song downloads in the country. And since it helped put the Tower Records of the world out of business, lots of artists think there's nowhere to go except iTunes. But how much money are (even famous) bands really making off all those 99-cent singles? Here's, uh, one perspective:

Did you know that Scion, maker of postal-truck-looking autos, has its own record label as a marketing strategy? Just like TAG Body Spray! One member of Scion's target demographic suggests an alternate use for those dollars: "Trying to figure out how to unfuck their hideous looking vehicles." [Animal]

One way to get some press for your upstart cosmetics company: send a group of naked girls to walk around Herald Square. [Daily Intel]

Hard to believe our nation's star athletes have time to go to the gym and practice jumpshots or whatever, what with all their marketing strategy meetings and reality shows and plotting to invade China like the second coming of opium. Sports stars and their sponsors have known for years that China is the market of the future-"If only 1% of Chinese buy our sneakers, that's $300 million more in revenue blah blah..." just like every other business in the world. But the Olympics have whet athletes' appetites even more. They want to rule China. The question is, why is China letting them do it?

Every convention needs a good catchphrase! Bill Clinton had "A place called Hope" in 1992. Michael Dukakis floated on the wings of Ann Richards' "Poor George" speech in 1988. And John Kerry to this day wakes up every morning in a cold sweat, screaming "Help is on the way!" Come to think of it, maybe memorable catchphrases aren't all that predictive of success. But this year's Democratic Convention already has two in as many days. There's "yes we can," the Obama theme that already feels like an old standby, because he's been campaigning for president for 12 years. And now there's the new one Hillary Clinton coined tonight, "No way, no how, no McCain." That one impressed everyone because Clinton's "PUMAs" are getting cozy with John McCain. The Democrats need to stop coining memorable slogans every day, or they'll end up with a library of mindless partisan sayings and talking points, and might just win the election. Click the video icon to watch Clinton try and push her supporters back into the party fold.

Remember that guy who got his "Bring Back Crystal Pepsi" sign onto MSNBC while a political analyst was trying to talk about Michelle Obama's big speech or whatever? Well, we heard from his roommate this morning, and asked for some more information on the grassroots political campaign that's already threatening to eclipse both Ron Paul and Ralph Nader. What we got back was a manifesto that could easily be folded into the Democratic Party platform, and probably should, because honestly the convention is already so HARSH, what with all the talk of war and economic depression and sexism and so forth. Also, this Crystal Pepsi thing, along with (OK OK) the other street protests, is probably the closest the convention comes to actual political dialog. Escape the pageantry for the moment and think about important issues, after the jump.

Newsbreak: Spanish tennis champion Rafael Nadal regrets posing topless for New York Magazine. Look, I didn't actually know who Rafael Nadal was before he posed topless for New York Magazine except that he is an Olympic athlete and now he has broken the record for shortest length of time between the appearance of said photo on newsstands and the supposed expression of dismay that said photo would ever appear on newsstands. "He is fine with being a sex symbol," a "source" tells MSNBC gossip Courtney Hazlett. "but New York took it a bit further than he was comfortable with."* Oh Jesus Christ.Okay, so yesterday we reported how Nadal's nonsubtle Adonisy photoshoot was actually a calculated effort on the part of his corporate overlord Nike to make him more marketable as a pitchman of clothes that are not made of space-aged lightweight wick-friendly flubber or whatever people are supposed to be "working out" in these days.** But Nike has had a lot of problems this Olympics. Namely: it does not sponsor Michael Phelps, it does not sponsor Shawn Johnson, and it does not sponsor Nastia Liukin. You are going to have to trust me when I say this FREAKS THEM THE FUCK OUT. One former Nike executive we know even blames the $19 billion athletaspirationalism peddler's relevance insecurity for its inexplicable Orwellian internet manhunt of the anonymous troll who suggested it forced underperforming runner Liu Xiang to drop out of the games:

One good way to create a website is to pay a single agency just enough money to do the job, put them on a tight deadline, fact check the content, and then publish it. Easy! Many people who are incompetent in several vital areas of life-human interaction, for example-have nevertheless managed to start and run successful websites with few start up costs at all. But the nation of Italy decided, hey, why don't we do the opposite of all that, and see how much money we can burn through in pursuit of a conceptual online fiasco? So they did! Italy wanted to build a website to market the nation to prospective tourists. The cost so far: $66 million over five years. And it doesn't even exist yet! Among the problems: Too many cooks in the kitchen ("Several government ministries — in two administrations — and each of Italy's 20 regions were involved in creating the portal"), a product that went live in 2007 full of embarrassing errors, databases that weren't compatible with each other, and a logo purchased for $150,000 that was eventually discarded for sucking too much. A consultant tells the WSJ that the government could have had an agency complete the entire project by now for around 2% of what's been spent. Try Blogspot.com, yo. [WSJ]

Fired Reddit cofounder and noted nontrepreneur Aaron Swartz says developers shouldn't roll out software with a Hollywood-style launch, as the rock-star coders at collaboration-software makers 37 Signals say. Swartz favors "the Gmail Launch," he writes on his blog, Raw Thought. The gist of his argument, below.

Steve Stoute is Jay-Z's partner in Translation Advertising, and specializes in connecting huge corporations to "urban" celebrities for ridiculous amounts of money. Such as R&B star Chris Brown's secret deal to make a song all about Wrigley's gum, but not tell anyone until after it was a #1 hit! "It's incredible that an artist was nominated for a Video of the Year with a Wrigley's jingle," says Stoute. Yes, quite. "And 'selling out' today, he adds, means creating inauthentic relationships between pop culture and product." Oh, I thought it meant "The Slogan On Steve Stoute's Business Card." [Adweek]

You thought that Rafael Nadal's pensive, shirtless pose on the back cover of New York magazine last week was just one more coup by the mag's upscale media trendsetters? Think again! Nadal himself-or, more accurately, his corporate overseer Nike-is in the midst of remaking his entire image, shifting it from that of a wild young ball-slinger to something "more mature" (and better able to sell polo shirts). The first casualty: his capri pants. Sorry, ladies:

Someone is lying at Nike. The only question is who. The mystery surrounds how the shoe company approached the thuggish Chinese dictatorship over online rumors about an athlete it sponsors. No one disputes that Nike, which recently claimed its shoes have "become an icon of self-expression and a symbol of Democratic style," ran to the repressive regime in a snit. Someone claiming to be close to Nike had issued an anonymous Web post claiming the company forced Liu Xiang, pictured, to exit the games because he was unlikely to win. This echoed tampering allegations Nike also faced in Brazil. Does Nike want the poster hunted down and thrown in jail? Hunted down and unmasked, so he can be sued? Or simply handled by the Chinese government in whatever manner it feels appropriate? No one has any idea, because Nike keeps changing its story — and digging itself into a deeper hole.

Have you seen any of those dozens of YouTube videos where a dude in a lab coat puts random things in a blender and proves that, yes, they will blend? It's a successful viral advertising project! So successful that the company claims that "sales have risen 600% since the videos started." The Times points out that most of the company's customer base is commercial, so it's highly unlikely the videos themselves are the reason for the increase. Still, this god damn blender company, of all things, is savvy enough to team up with AT&T to blend an iPhone, and to get itself into the top search results for "Chuck Norris" by blending an action figure, so you have to give them some props, ridiculous though their strategy is. After the jump, watch pop culture things blend for murky reasons:

Good morning, mysterious "weekend" readers! Where are you rising and shining from today? New York City? Kansas City? A garbage-strewn gutter somewhere in Mexico City, wondering what happened to your wallet and your dignity? Hey, at least you're not waking up in New Jersey, amirite? Zing. Apologies to those of you who are waking up in New Jersey. But not to fear: the reputation of postindustrial wastelands like Newark and Trenton is being revived. Not by reality itself, but by luxury real estate developers. Open your wallets! The Times examines how developers of luxury apartment buildings in Newark and Trenton are pushing their inventory. Answer: lots of lipstick for the pigs.