Everyone's nervous about the Olympics this year. The Chinese government's politicization of the ceremonies reminded sponsors and spectators alike of its human rights record, particularly in Tibet. Broadcasters are pushing back against restrictions on TV reporting. Athletes are concerned about air quality. In short, the Olympics are the same politicized mess they've always been, and more commercial than ever. How to keep everyone focused on the athletic action? Easy, just keep the cameras pointed at the lithe young hardbodies that flock to this competition every four years. And if that seems like a lecherous degradation of a noble event, remember this: the Olympians themselves are notoriously bad at keeping their hands off one another once they get eliminated from competition. Remind yourself by browsing this photo gallery of hot Olympic athletes past and present, curated by intern Nicola Gherson.

The archly dystopian series of Web videos feature 20somethings in L.A. using a wide range of Google's Web products. Google via text message? Customized maps? I bet most of the series' viewers had no idea Google even offered such services. Sure, the horror-film-lite endings won't play well in Larry and Sergey's candy-colored, hyperliteralist utopia. But it's high time Google starts figuring out some way to market itself besides pointing to the exercise balls and free food.

The New York subway poster art vandal, despite receiving widespread acclaim from the cognoscenti who determine who's hot these days, continues to work just as hard as when he was not yet being compared to Banksy (who, let's face it, is totally over now that we know who he is, maybe). He's retained his "ironic sloganeering" theme, and is moving strongly into "messing with faces," as well. Here are five of the anonymous subway vandal's latest ad remixes; steal them immediately, as investments:

Tim Horton's, a coffee chain that caters to the Canadian Menace, is kicking Starbucks' ass on Facebook. There is a group called "Biodegradable Cups at Tim Hortons" with more than 10,000 members. This means that Starbucks could use some of T.H.'s online marketing savvy. And, that Canadians are suicidally bored. [Ad Age]

The New York subway system is taking full advantage of its plan to sell all flat surfaces for advertising, including the outside of trains. The latest and most appropriate sponsor of the metal cattle car that you squeeze yourself into every depressing morning: Mad Men, the acclaimed show about advertising! Even if you barely miss your train as it pulls away, leaving you frustrated and abandoned, you'll still be educated about the existence of Mad Men. Sweet. More pics of the hellaciously busy interior of these message-wielding cars, after the jump.

Do pop-up ads qualify as "deceptive marketing practices"? Good Morning America says "yes." A free enterprise advocacy group says "no." We say "yes, but don't you know not to click that shit by now?" We guess it's a public service that GMA did a spot last week warning people not to enter their credit card info into pop-ups. But if you're doing that, you are either elderly, or doomed to be snuffed out by the principles of Darwinian evolution in the digital age. Expect the marketing industry to strenuously object; pop-ups are simply an "information channel" in their view, the bastards. Watch the GMA clip, after the jump:

"Unregulated product placement is out of control these days," said Hamilton as he took a long, satisfying sip of his Folgers-brand coffee, savoring the full-bodied flavor. "Particularly on television, where product placement is an increasingly necessary source of revenue for all your favorite and least favorite shows." Now the FCC is trying to regulate it in a hilariously heavy-handed way, and evil marketing geniuses are fighting back by, inexplicably, flaunting their scary power over everything you see. "We almost consider ourselves to be the junior writers on the show," says one. The government willl destroy everything to stop you, fiend!:

Most of the time people say an ad campaign is "good," they just mean that it's funny. Less often, it could be poignant, or provocative, or straight-out informative. But there's always the "incredibly morbid" tactic, too. It works! Making your audience shudder means they remember what you said. Or are permanently scarred by it. Same difference. After the jump, five ads that get their point across by evoking death, disfigurement, or sex crimes:

Microsoft's plan to counteract Apple's pigeonholing of the company as "PC," the staid, gray suit-wearing office drone played by John Hodgeman in Apple's commercials? Start sounding more like Richard Nixon of course. Microsoft announced it will spend $300 million on an advertising campaign with agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Corporate VP of Windows Consumer Product Brad Brooks told reporters the message will be: "The quiet majority of million and millions of Windows Vista users out there are going to have a great experience. The message is ‘Move to Vista. The time of worry is over.’" Sounds a lot like Nixon's 1969 appeal "to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans" for support for the Vietnam War to us. Which of course puts Apple in the late Beatles-esque, commercially safe "think different" psuedo-hippy crowd — right where it wants to be.

"When I’m promoting a show for program for Discovery I turn into a giant media slut.'" [TV Decoder]

Let's imagine that you are the friendly consumer, and the internet, where you do your shopping, is a series of stores. Then imagine that all the people who want to sell you ads are spies, following you from store to store and noting what you like to look at, so they can advertise that thing to you. Then think about what kind of internet "store" you've been going to. That's right, the porn store! This is the real reason people are mad about online ad targeting. Stop looking at us look at porn just so you can learn to sell us more porn!

Egobloggers Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble as well as startup PR clearinghouse Michael Arrington all want to know: How amazing is it that after two years of using Twitter, they've each already got nearly half as many "followers" on FriendFeed after just a few months? Asking the question, each offer hypothetical answers involving the social-network aggregator's ease of use — "The comment systems is so fast and easy that it's perfect," says Calacanis — or Twitter's frequent outages — "Twitter downtime plays a big part," writes Arrington. But here's the real answer to the amazing growth these bloggers have seen on FriendFeed:

A couple months ago we heard that Atlanta rap mogul and midget Jermaine Dupri was starting a record label financed by Procter & Gamble and the sickly TAG body spray as a way to more effectively spread TAG body spray to the urban masses. For a moment it looked like right wing racism might have the unexpected benefit of scuttling the project, but alas. Now it's even worse: Every brand wants to make their own records. But hey, they just want the artist dudes to "have fun, as though they were doing any song" (about Converse, the shoe of grave-robbing image pimps):

The Internet was supposed to have turned us all into niche market consumers instead of the herd-driven bestseller fanatics we've always been. In 2006, Wired editor Chris Anderson published The Long Tail, a book which argued that because commercial sites like Amazon and Netflix weren't constrained by the same brick-and-mortar inventories as Borders and Blockbuster, people who shopped online would do so in less concentrated packs at the "head" of the demand curve; instead they'd spread the wealth around the "tail" end of it. As Anderson wrote, "narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare," or George Romero can compete with Steven Spielberg. Well, now a Harvard Business School professor says the Long Tail theory is bunkum. Even online, we're as bovine and conformist as we've always been offline.

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]

Stephen Bower, the A&R and marketing director of Vanguard Records, writes in regarding our earlier post on Vanguard artist Greg Laswell, the "indie" (according to the WSJ) musician who has a slew of corporate promotional deals. "As for Greg's indie cred, I've never been entirely sure what that means exactly, but for what its worth he made the entire new record in a garage, in 3 weeks, on a shoestring budget, and with a collection of pawnshop guitars, banjos, and noisemakers that would probably set you back $500 combined," says Bower. Noted! His full rumination on Laswell, indie-ness, and how all your favorite bands are forced to do corporate shit these days, after the jump.

Dude, it is so refreshing to listen to "indie" musicians because "indie" musicians are "independent" from corporate control. Ha. We should pretty much eradicate the word "indie," which has become a total, depressing farce. In order to sell a single freaking song in today's environment, musicians must rush around bootlicking every monster corporation of any type willing to give away some airplay and free promotion. It's only a matter of time before Lockheed Martin is making bombs that play Pearl Jam songs on the way down. Witness what one single up-and-coming "indie" singer named Greg Laswell subjected himself to in the quest for publicity:

$8 million. Does that seem like a lot of money for a company to pay to have mediocre models use their hair products on a mediocre cable show for a few seasons? It kind of does. But that's how much The Weinstein Company, run by entertainment mogul Harvey Weinstein, is trying to squeeze out of L'Oreal for three seasons of sponsorship of Project Runway. Of course, Weinstein has a long history of pimping out the fashion reality show to every company on earth willing to pay a dime to be on it, using it as a profit machine to support his company's less sure-thing ventures. And he's still milking it for every cent. How do we know? Because he left all the evidence in a public trash can:

Activists in Philadelphia are upset about an ad campaign for Colt 45 malt liquor—specifically, its cartoonish wall murals in poor neighborhoods showing party people living it up while swilling 40s, with the slogan "Works Every Time." One woman tells the AP she wouldn't want her daughter looking at it because "She might think it's cool." Which is a reasonable response from a parent to ads for everything from malt liquor to Bratz dolls. One would think that companies in the vice industries would have learned from Joe Camel that there is nothing to gain but backlash from cartoon-style ads, but apparently not. Colt 45 has an equally objectionable website full of cartoons, which also shows a fundamental disconnect with the rotgut company's own customer base; bird watchers (educated guess, here) are not really a cost-effective target audience :

When you see some random guy walking down a crowded street talking on his cell phone, lost in his own world, you probably think to yourself: there is a man I would like to smash right in the face. If a cell phone company were to find some way to successfully incorporate that feeling into its marketing plan, it would be genius. Instead, US Cellular goes and makes what is, by critical consensus, the most asinine cell phone ad of the year. That's because its premise is that that same man walking along yakking obliviously into his cell would actually make the entire world around him happy. Which just makes you want to smash him even more: