Author and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing thinks the current marketing climate for young authors is damaging—in fact, she feels "desperately sorry" for them. "Now what happens is that if you are a girl who's good-looking and has written even a passable book you can be earning enormous sums of money very quickly and are then sent on a promotional tour... there are people who can't write a second book because they are always on the telephone or having to do some TV thing." (It must be said: back in the day, Doris was a total babe!) To paraphrase Diane Keaton: if a young lady is good-looking, she won't have to spend as much time working on her "fucking personality!" Or her book. [Times of London]

And so, with two days to let the devastating news sink in, Variety now asks the inevitable question of what's to be done with Heath Ledger's final projects—the wrapped The Dark Knight, and Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Morbidly running through the history of productions faced with surprise cast deaths during shooting (apparently CGI has now taken over for stunt doubles and very low lighting as the re-animating technique of choice), the report then addresses the issue of how such misfortune might cast marketing campaigns in an unpleasant new light. As we pointed out on Tuesday, The Dark Knight's focuses squarely and gruesomely on Ledger's chillingly effective performance as The Joker, providing an unwelcome creative predicament for WB's marketing czar:

These days, of course, Sundance is less a film festival than a promotional platform for marketers such as Anheuser-Busch that burnish themselves by association with celebrities. Or, as 5WPR chief and Joe Francis supporter Ronn Torossian boasted this week on his blog: "All of our partner brands receiving tremendous influencer relations." So how does the self-important New York publicist work his PR magic? With Kim Kardashian in a condom-dispensing photo booth. Lifestyles is a client. Kim Kardassian is somebody. And Complex Magazine undoubtedly endeared itself to its cool kid readers by cosponsoring the 5W party where the Hilton sisters danced on tables while watching DJ AM spin, a scene Ronn describes as "like watching Michael Jordan play basketball I suppose." Classy!

If we get one more plug from India or Italy or L.A. or some other godforsaken place, plugging the latest Ayurvedic shunt or whatever, cleverly time-stamped for several decades from now, we will set ourselves on fire. We see you hanging there at the top of our date-sorted inbox and we hate you.

Brand-new author with a book coming out? Turns out your literary star may burn brighter than you think! Publishing houses have long been known to pay bookstore giants for prime sales floor positions for the titles they're putting their weight behind-that's nothing new. But it turns out chains like Barnes and Noble also employ some sort of secret algorithm based on an author's previous B&N sales to determine where a book gets stashed in the store. First-time authors aren't penalized for their blank track records-good news for all you eager beaver up-and-comers! But if your last book blew (we're looking at you, James Lipton) or if it happened to catch Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani on one of her many many cranky days, head back to the Self-Help section where you might find your Great American Novel wedged spine-in under Astrology. If you have knowledge of the secret code, let us know.

Would you like to buy a life-like action figure modeled on popular internet-based "marketing guru" Seth Godin? Yes? Then please never, ever introduce yourself to us. [NerdApproved]

Nothing says "good job" like a heart attack, we always say. So we were thrilled to learn that "last week, students in Seminole County, Florida apparently received their report cards in envelopes adorned with Ronald McDonald promising a free Happy Meal to students with good grades, behavior or attendance." IS NOTHING SACRED?

How bad do you want to go viral on the Web? Al Qaeda bad? Because I hear the fundamentalist-Islamic terrorist group is the best around at spreading by word of mouse. This according to Gabriel Weimann, professor of communications at the University of Haifa in Israel. Weinman monitors 5,800 militant Islamist sites, and he's got bad news about the terrorists' ability to market themselves on the Web.

Lazy-student-targeting fast food delivery site Campusfood.com is offering a huge $1 dollar-off promotion for the latest probably readable-but-kinda-crappy film adaptation-ready Nick Hornby novel. It's called SLAM and it's about teenage parenthood and, uh, Tony Hawk. If you and like 40 friends order soon you'll save enough to get yourselves some Plan B!

Slam [Campusfood.com]

A marketing firm just interviewed 926 of the gays and found out some things! 70% of them preferred their T.V. shows to have some gays on them. 51% of the gay dudes were single, while only a quarter of the lesbians were. Also the gay men spent more time in bars! They all love "Grey's Anatomy" and Toyotas and Bank of America and Calvin Klein and ads with people snuggling and with rainbow flags really appealed to them! (Blargh!) AND THEN they divided respondents into different types of gays and created the best graph ever in which we discover a new virulent class of SUPER GAYS.

Wanna be the coolest kid on your block? Then don't buy the B'phone! Yes, Beyoncé has a brand new phone out by Samsung, and for a mere $99 you get a Beyoncé themed start-up screen as well as the ability to download exclusive Beyoncé photos, videos, and music— including a song she recorded when she was 10. As Beyoncé said in a press conference yesterday, "It's only through this phone that you can get this close to my life."

With Lars and the Real Girl set to open in various markets over the next few weeks—it's the buzzed-about Ryan Gosling film about a lonely misfit deluded into thinking he's fallen in love with a mail-order silicone sex doll—producers are facing a marketing challenge: Sure, the concept alone might sell tickets to a built-in, RealDoll-enthusiast audience, who'll arrive opening night with high hopes of cheerleading costumes and raunchy, multi-doll orgies. But how to get the rest of America to warm to what is in actuality a mild and sweet-natured film about small town, churchgoing folk? One solution, employed by Hollywood in the past to varying degrees of success, is to target one's sex-doll movie directly to the Christians who'd most identify with its message of universal tolerance:

With next summer's franchise blockbusters like The Dark Knight and Indiana Jones in the Land of the Diamond Skulls knee-deep into their production schedules, so are plans for the confectionery merchandising tie-ins coveted by shrill, skirt-tugging children and paunchy, middle-aged fanboys alike. Eschewing such creative but functionally infeasible options of the past—such as the boulder-sizedRaiders gobstopper that tragically killed 17 children in the summer of 1981—Lucasfilm has paired with Mars to deliver a chai-coconut Snickers that simply screams "adventure in exotic locales." Brandweek reports:

It's a dilemma for Google: It spends very little on advertising, preferring to let its products speak for themselves (and leaving its marketing chief, David Lawee, without much of a job). And why not, since that's given it the world's most cost-effective brand. But that has left the company tone-deaf in speaking to Madison Avenue, since it hardly practices what it preaches. Finally, as I've advised for ages, Google has hired a brander-in-chief, Ogilvy & Mather's Andy Berndt.

What red-blooded American child wouldn't rather have nice, healthy apple slices in a frybox than the warm, salty bits of FAT that they're used to? Burger King, doing its best to be a good corporate citizen and fight the good fight against obesity, is offering this new snack in a "frypod." Better question: which marketing consultant decided that evoking "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in a snack would make it more appealing?

The troubled online universe isn't dead yet, claims the gullible Hollywood Reporter. The Tinseltown trade, spun like a top by Second Life creator Linden Lab's denial campaign, reports on a marketing "success" story. Brand agency This Second Marketing employed virtual street teams in Second Life to promote the 3D Imax version of the latest Harry Potter movie. After 840 hours of handing out digital tchotchkes and evangelizing the flick, the team managed to reach 15,099 avatars. This only sounds impressive to Hollywood scribblers who can't do simple math.

Because we at Defamer realize that many of our readers toil in windowless dungeons buried deep beneath Hollywood's surface, and that any glimpse of the sky, no matter how secondhand, is likely to temporarily brighten the drudgery of their slave labor, we share with you this reader-supplied photo (click the above image for a larger version) of the Live Free or Die Hard promotional display soaring over Los Feliz a little earlier this afternoon. Unfortunately, the most crucial part of the four plane-formation, i.e., the one trailing the OTHERFUCKER component of the airborne campaign, was grounded prematurely due to technical problems, leaving spectators merely with an unsatisfying, incomplete message of "YIPPEE KI YAY M...THE BEST IS BACK...LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD."

The Defamer Special Correspondent on Cost-Conscious Summer Blockbuster Promotion just beamed us this cameraphone photo revealing the recent whereabouts of the Transformers BigFuckingRobotsMobile first spotted at the Burbank Staples on Monday morning. Dreamworks' economy-class rolling command center was parked outside of the Ca$h Plus near the corner of Alameda and Main (precise coordinates mapped here), where its conspicuous presence undoubtedly enticed dozens of potential ticket-buyers to squirrel away their freshly cashed paychecks until the movie's Fourth of July opening.

This summer's prolonged barrage of blockbusters with extensive toy tie-ins—Spider-Man 3, Pirates 3, Transformers, etc—provides parents with an unprecedented opportunity to divert an unhealthy chunk of their discretionary income to Hollywood, as any trip to the multiplex must be immediately followed by one to the WalMart toy aisle, lest this generation of savvy youngsters report their miserly guardians to Child Protective Services for their neglect. Today's LAT looks at the competition to see which studio/manufacturer combination can extort the most money from families with their pirate-themed televisions, robot-concealing trucks, or splooge-launching Spider-guns (now with spiral-squirting action!), offering up a brief encounter with a local dad who's losing his battle with the wallet-plundering, merchandising menace:

As this afternoon drags on, we've become increasingly desperate for any material not related to either The House-Arrested Socialite Who Shall Not Be Named, At Least In This Post or the imminent destruction of various entertainment industry outposts along Wilshire Boulevard. But salvation finally arrived in the form of this reader-supplied cameraphone photo of the sky above the Fox lot, illustrating ABC Family's efforts to publicize Kyle XY, a basic cable television show that our research has revealed to be about a teenage boy's struggles to remove a tight-fitting undershirt. Additionally, the bothersome buzzing of skywriting biplanes (really, this stunt never gets old!) prompted some others to document the difficult of properly rendering a airborne promotional message on a windy day: