Seriously, what's going on with these Bonnie Fuller columns in Ad Age? The deposed Star chief must still be desperate for cash. And Ad Age must be desperate for amusement, because the main thing these columns do is expose the fact that Bonnie Fuller-despite being paid astronomical amounts of money by several media moguls-is not all that bright. At least when it comes to writing about and/ or analyzing things. Her last column blew the big A-Rod-and-Madonna conspiracy wide open; and today, she reveals what's really going on with Barack Obama's "celebrity" strategy. The twisted truth must come out! You see, Barack Obama didn't just stumble onto the cover of People magazine by chance. Oh no. It's all part of a big PR strategy! That's how things work in the high-level circles to which Bonnie Fuller is privy:

Hey, did we know that some neighborhoods have corner stores, which sell foodstuffs? The Bodega Party in a Box is a tool from the Neighbors Project, which is "is a growing movement of a generation of people living in cities who want to connect with their diverse neighbors to improve the neighborhood for everyone." OK, let's withhold judgment until we take a look inside Pandora's bodega-box, shall we?

Deep down in our hearts, where we keep our darkest fears hidden, we knew this day would come: the day when you find out after the fact that a hit song is actually an advertisement. Let the tears of rage flow. Chris Brown is not the vessel of true love that you thought! When the R&B star sang "We can go anywhere, go anywhere/ But first, it's your chance, take my hand, come with me," he wasn't talking to you, girl; he was talking to your Wrigley's Doublemint gum. But the company is only revealing its sponsorship after Brown's song, "Forever," had become a top-10 hit. We don't want to appear as if we invest the music of Chris Brown with any meaning whatsoever; but now would be an appropriate time to begin boycotting Wrigley, if you would like to have the option of listening to songs that aren't sponsored by mega-corporations in the coming decade.

When a business has completely saturated one market, it can either die out or expand into another market. I think it's safe to say that rap-as-pop-music has reached its tipping point in terms of US commercial appeal. Luckily there's a billion people in India who have yet to embrace pimpology! Rappers in America have been stealing Indian music for beats for quite a while now, but the relationship hasn't been reciprocal. Snoop Dogg is on the kizzle, though, coming to Mumbizzle with a suitcase full of mizzle (marketing strategies). His main obstacle? India's current old-ass musical tastes:

Portfolio's fashion blog posted a blind item yesterday about a luxury fashion marketing exec who has terrorized her underlings for years, and is now about to be cut loose, although she doesn't know it yet. We hear the exec in question is Ann Taylor Davis, who's at Tumi (for now). Or so the rumor goes! You can say you heard it on a blog, Ann. [Fashion Inc.]

Should menthol cigarettes be banned? From a public health standpoint, shit yea. It would be best for all of us if the only cigarettes available were unattractively packaged, harsh-tasting, and unwieldy. As a Kool smoker, though, I have mixed feelings. You know who else does? Members of the Congressional Black Caucus who receive bundles of cash from the tobacco industry! The fact that "75 percent of black smokers choose mentholated brands" means that the current battle over whether or not to ban them goes to issues even deeper than their sweet, sweet mentholated taste. Things at stake: billions of dollars in revenue, hundreds of millions in marketing campaigns, racial tension, and how happy cigarette companies are to kill you in exchange for money! The current bill in Congress would ban "flavored" cigarettes, but exempt menthols. The Black Caucus is an important player because they stand for the black community—the most enthusiastic consumers of menthols—and they've been wooed big time by tobacco companies.

Poor Nike just cannot catch a break these days. First all the gays and their blog commenter followers got upset about Nike's new ads featuring a guy with his nuts in another guy's face, which some say are homophobic. (Nike's ad agency would like you all to STFU with your whining about that, BTW). And this controversy is distracting them from the process of pulling all their "Air Stab" shoes out of UK stores because the god damn Brits can't stop knifing each other! The insatiable British appetite for stabbing their fellow citizens caused bad PR levels to rise so high that Nike had to start pulling the shoes last week-even though they've been selling them for 20 years.

Central Park: it's sacred space worth billions. But it will be public forever! It will never be sullied by the hand of commerce, or turned into a commercial venue! Except for the huge silver Chanel "Mobile Art pavilion," modeled after a Chanel handbag, that will descend on the park this fall. But it's really an art exhibit, you see, and Chanel is giving a huge donation to be able to put it there, so the commercial angle is totally superfluous. Except that all the freaking art is "inspired by Chanel's classic 2.55 quilted-style chain handbag." You clever bastards. Larger picture of the alien-looking new kind of ad in your life, below:

With all the billions of dollars that pour into the Olympics, you'd think that the least the host committee could do would be to come up with a decent mascot. But no! In a classic case of overthinking something into oblivion, cities obsess over the stupid mascots for years, until they create some sort of awful mutant-by-committee. This year is no different: the WSJ reports that the Beijing mascot (five assorted weird animal-like creatures, pictured) is disliked even by the artist who created them. Throughout the 70s and 80s, mascots were fairly normal: a tiger, an eagle, a bear, a beaver, a gay dachsund. But in 1992 abstraction took over, and the whole enterprise went off the rails. After the jump, pictures of the Olympic mascots from '92 onwards. They suck:

The "direct mail marketing" industry, also known as the people who bring you junk mail, is "going green." In related news, the hot dog industry will be going vegetarian. It seems patently ridiculous that a coalition of junk mailers is going to end pollution, but don't worry-they're not going to strain themselves too hard. "You don't want to scare companies away from joining because they fear some stringent regulation," explains one member. The general public is mired in environmental apathy these days, too. But maybe that's a good thing, considering what the alternative to "direct mail" is:

Nike's new ad campaign for its Hyperdunk shoes features a series of pictures of basketball players getting dunked on in what's considered the worst way possible: the dunker dangling off the rim, his balls dangling in the face of the man being dunk-ee. They all have dynamic slogans like "That Ain't Right!" The company has been plastering them around NYC's most famous streetball meccas, like Harlem (home to The Rucker) and West 4th St. Their rollout coincides with a big foofaraw this week (which some critics say is stupid oversensitivity) over whether the ad industry is making blatantly homophobic ads. All of which raises the question: Are these Nike ads a new low in homophobic advertising? Or do the gays just not understand basketball?

There's no time like a recession to reassert the conventional economic wisdom that making money is harder than those guys on cable pretend. Viral marketing was huge in the mid-90's before the dotcom bubble burst and everyone realized that eyeballs didn't necessarily translate into dollars. It was only a matter of time before the next crop of counterintuitive pop business theorists — from Malcolm Gladwell to James Surowiecki to Chris Anderson — were doused with the cold waters of cash flow. What's so interesting about this latest cycle of backlash and disillusionment, though, is that the assailants are almost all former apostles turned heretics. After the jump, the spats and surprisingly friendly debates about whether the new memes of trendsetting will remain trendy for very long.

You may never find a better moment in history to marvel at the craven pseudo-patriotism of international corporations than now, when all the world's major consumer companies are fighting to ingratiate themselves to Chinese consumers. That's China, the Red Menace! Did you know that Pepsi ran a promotion changing the color of its cans to red to honor China('s communism)? It's true! Did you know McDonald's ads now say "I'm lovin it when China wins"? The traitorous scum! Where is the xenophobic backlash? Also, ad execs are scoffing at the robot-like sameness of all these new commercials touting various companies' Chinese patriotism. Below, one McDonald's spot, and one Pepsi spot. Do the Chinese really scream so much?

New York Life has a foolproof plan for its new online promotion: they let any member of the internet riff-raff go on their website and submit three-word slogans, which are displayed in the company's trademark blue box. Looks just like the real thing. I can see why they want some new ideas, considering what they have now. Jeez. [via Afreak]

Well, it's been a year or two since the corporate world started its "green" advertising revolution, and it's worked. The problem is solved! The problem being the fickle consumer's desire to hear companies talk about how "green" they are. "After 18 months, levels of concern on any issue tend to drop off," explains one marketing wizard. Now we can all sit back and feel good about what we've accomplished! The earth is still destined for environmental ruin, but at least we'll be subjected to less marketing bastardization like this:

What does it take to get an executive from the freaking cable company royally pissed about customer service? How about a Washington, DC-area coffee shop that refused to serve him a simple. God. Damned. Iced. ESPRESSO? And that told him, "if you ever show your face at my shop, I'll punch you in your dick?" As you might imagine, a 32-year-old New Yorker subjected to such depravities in Arlington, VA or where-the-hell-ever does not simply swallow such BULL shit and move on — he blogs about it! Come read about this horrible thing that happened to Jeff "The Iceman" Simmermon, and how he got it onto Boing Boing, Metafilter, the Washington Post and, this morning, into the New York Post.

Bottled water is a bit like smoking: deep down, we all knew there was something wrong with it from day one. Environmentalism has been a widespread subject in our public consciousness for more than 30 years now. Did anyone really believe that getting our water out of 16-ounce plastic bottles would be an efficient long-term solution for humanity? Despite that, the bottled water industry has done an admirable job using sly marketing magic to make us all feel like chemical-ridden cheapskates for drinking out of the tap. And a new book called Bottlemania breaks down the corporate spin techniques in a straightforward way that already has me drinking exclusively out of the toilet:

If you didn't think reality television could get any better than a show about people singing ad jingles and being judged by scandal-plagued former Wal-Mart marketing chief-turned ad world fameball Julie Roehm, think again! Roehm-whose flirting once cost an ad agency a $580 million contract-can't judge all those jingles by herself. So CBS, in full scrambling mode, has selected another judge who is equally respected in the advertising industry: KISS burnout and sex tape star Gene Simmons!

Vogue has always acted disdainful of reality television. When it became clear the fashion title had passed on something big with Project Runway, Vogue editor Anna Wintour sniffed that her magazine "is not in the business of making entertainment out of the struggles of new designers." Fine. How, then, to explain Vogue's seeming reversal, its participation in an online reality show about the travails of three young models? With denial. "This isn't a reality show," cries the trailer. Other shows are "just amateurs live" Vogue publisher Tom Florio told the Wall Streer Journal, while this one is co-produced by modeling agency IMG, which makes it totally legitimate. The show's tagline is more honest, but still rubbishes the rest of the genre: "Reality TV just got real." Well, at least someone has. Preview video after the jump.

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?