We loooove it when big corporations, major nonprofits, and government agencies have blogs. They always so totally nail the personal, intimate voice that makes blogs so readable and addictive, except not. Ever. Witness: 'The Quitter,' an American Cancer Society-sponsored blog about a dude who is about as good at acting as lonelygirl15, and his attempt to quit smoking. Witness his heartfelt testimonials and his just-a-regular-guy locutions!

The Kaiju Shakedown blog points us to this ad for a Fuzhou hospital that has seemingly engaged the unauthorized endorsement services of Prison Break star Wentworth Miller to advertise their ability to quickly cure the prostate problems of the local populace. The Fox marketing team's various promotional efforts on behalf of the show should make us all suspicious that the strange ad is part of a viral campaign preparing the Chinese people for the show's arrival in their country, and that once translated, its fine print warns viewers that if they don't tune in to The Glorious Escape of the Innocent Bald-Head, an ex-convict will arrive at their home to massage their prostates until their television-watching habits are properly adjusted.

Springboarding off the just-released Fast Food Nation's dramatization of how burger chains and Hollywood conspire to bloat America's children by inducing them to gorge on diabetes-inducing meat slabs en route to the plastic Shrek toy contained in their movie tie-in meals, the LAT's Patrick Goldstein calls out studio chiefs for happily endorsing a variety of social causes (AIDS, the environment, any other issue involving a charity dinner with an open bar) while ignoring the damage that McRibs are inflicting on advertising-prone kids:

For those of you who found last week's David Lynch promotional stunt for Inland Empire too geographically inconvenient to attend, you have a second chance to catch the director, his trusty cow sidekick, and various signs celebrating Laura Dern's performance in person, where you can possibly absorb some of his cryptic wisdom on the origins of cheese. Alerts a reader apparently unaware that Lynch and his bovine prop previously graced a corner in Hollywood last Thursday:

A couple of readers lucky enough to be on a Staples distribution list have forwarded along this e-mail (pictured) that went out on Friday, proudly touting the company's MailMate™ shredder's upcoming appearance on this week's episode of The Office. It seems that NBC has learned something from their product placement misadventures of the recent past, figuring out that if they partnered with an advertiser ahead of time to spotlight the product's more appealing features instead of demonstrating the unintended, finger-mangling uses of its whirring blades, the network could generate hefty placement fees instead of costly lawsuits.

Universal's exhaustive research into underexploited marketing opportunities seems to have revealed that potential moviegoers demonstrate an impressive recall rate of their product when a disembodied voice delivers a pitch to the targeted consumer while he's engaged in an act of waste elimination, ensuring that our once-sacred urinal time is about to be as aggressively ad-riddled as the rest of our lives. Reports the Defamer Special Correspondent On What The Fuck, Can't I Even Take A Piss Without Hearing A Movie Ad Now? on the new campaign for Let's Go to Prison:

In what we hope completes our multimedia coverage of yesterday's publicity stunt, in which David Lynch mysteriously appeared on the corner of Hollywood and La Brea with a cow and copious promotional signage for Inland Empire, we pass along this clip, submitted by two guys who claim to have been driving by the site and who were so delighted by the bovine/auteur tableaux that they took a moment to talk to the infamously quirky director, capturing on video some Lynchian (really, how do you avoid that word in this context?) wisdom about the provenance of cheese.

This excited (though secondhand) report just landed in our inbox:

We missed 30 Rock last night, but a reader's curiosity about the fine kitchen appliance featured prominently in the show's premiere episode sent us to the DVR to have a look for ourselves:

While the disastrous, completely unforeseen dissolution of Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn's soul-mate-level bond almost certainly dooms the upcoming DVD release of The Break-Up to instant, bargain-bin obscurity, some publicists insist on seeing the glass that Aniston undoubtedly hurtled at her former partner's head during their heart-wrenching split as half full. This pitch, which bravely ignores the impossible task handed to them by the campaign-crushing appearance of real-life interpersonal strife, landed in our inbox this morning:

Wanting to cultivate the kind of obsessive devotion that drives fans of Lost to scrutinize the possibly anachronistic inclusion of home appliances in The Hatch, Fox's publicity department decided to promote fledgling drama Vanished by embedding "enigmatic clues about a larger sinister conspiracy" in the show's press materials, hoping that members of the media would pick up their breadcrumb trail and lead their readers on a symbolic scavenger hunt to the ultimate prize: Nielsens good enough to avoid a hasty cancellation. Unfortunately, writers seem to have better things to do than hunch over a publicity photo with a magnifying glass and wonder if the plunging neckline of Rebecca Gayheart's blouse is a symbolic representation of a "V" or just a run-of-the-mill Fox attempt to spotlight a star's rack. Reports the LAT:

• The skeptic at Dead 2.0 asks Valley vets whether a blogger can become a media star. VC Paul Kedrosky says, "media businesses are generally crappy businesses, with rare obvious exceptions." [Dead 2.0]

Snakes on a Plane's disappointing™ inability to reach the $20 million opening weekend milestone triggered New Line's desperation "Snakes in a Theater" viral marketing campaign, in which a variety of deadly serpents will be released into multiplexes in underperforming regions, building the kind of word-of-mouth buzz that the studio wasn't able to translate from internet obsession into ticket sales. No one was bitten by the two rattlesnakes employed in the campaign's initial run at the AMC Desert Ridge in Phoenix, a misfire that New Line officials blamed on the exhibitor's failure to saturate its popcorn in the snake-provoking pheromones with which it was provided, but promised "six to ten" in-theater fatalities by the film's crucial second-weekend screenings.

• This Bud's For Me [Spare Room]

You've harassed yourself with the annoying, semi-customizable phone calls, purchased the absurdly expensive jewelry, and are now at a loss about the next step to take in your Snakes on a Plane fandom. Luckily, the marketing department at New Line will leave no promotional opportunity unexploited, and have teamed up with Dell to give you the exciting opportunity to spend $2,000 for a television upon which you may eventually watch director David R. Ellis' DVD featurette admission that nearly all of the film's dialogue was transcribed verbatim from the comment sections of SoaP-obsessed blogs. We're a little disappointed that the studio and the computer manufacturer didn't break new ground in the now-customary realm of product placement, as a climax in which Samuel L. Jackson decides that the only way to get the motherfucking snakes off his motherfucking plane is to detonate a Dell laptop battery and incinerate every last one of the reptilian stowaways seems like a logical extension of the campaign.

Marketing guru (and dot-com bubble veteran) Seth Godin knows that the best friends are the ones you paid for. That's why Penguin is marketing his new book (Small is the New Big, a collection of Seth's blog posts and Fast Company articles) through the controversial BzzAgent marketing group.

So that you wouldn't have to, Wired.com's Lore Sj berg sampled this summer's crop of breakfast cereal movie tie-ins, those boxed, promotional confections aimed at ensuring that the public is either breathing, eating, or excreting the studio's summer blockbusters at all times. Some of his findings:

The marketing braintrust at Paramount really weren't fucking around when they decided to leave no teen behind in their promotional campaign for World Trade Center, as they've erected a tasteful monument to their upcoming blockbuster hopeful on MySpace, the online home of all sophisticated discourse on recent national tragedies. The movie's collected just 40 friends so far (some of whom appear to be Paramount employees), but we're sure once WTC learns the ropes of social networking, it will soon collect an enthusiastic gang of Tila Tequila clones and middle-aged men who lie about their age to lure the naive Twin Towers into some hott cybersex while its parents are still at work.

When Paramount test-screened World Trade Center, the studio's altruistically conceived, non-exploitative attempt to keep fresh a five-year-old story hopelessly receding into a confusing blur of cable news footage with bad production values, they came to a startling realization: Teenagers might want to see this thing. Today's LAT details the steps Paramount's marketing department took in the aftermath of this epiphany, delivered to their promotional forebrain like a lightning bolt shot out of a plasma screen during an episode of Pimp My Ride:

To promote Fox Searchlight's small scale comedy Little Miss Sunshine, the Fox marketing department had someone drive the movie's iconic VW bus around town. An eyewitness managed to snap a cameraphone photo of the saffron-hued promobile, which, through either faulty mechanics or bad driving, managed to make afternoon traffic on Pico Blvd. even worse: