This year is just terrible across the board for local TV stations, whose traditional advertisers in financial services, automotive and retail have been slammed by the economic downturn. The only way they've been able to struggle through is with billions of dollars in political advertising, led by a record $250 million over five months for Barack Obama. According to the Times' David Carr, that's "a rate of advertising that outstrips Burger King, Apple and Gap on an annualized basis." What will the stations do when the election is over? Hell, what will Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show and David Gergen do?

It is easy to be so taken by Arianna Huffington's charm and personal history that one loses sight of the big picture. Just ask the New Yorker's Lauren Collins, whose profile of the Huffington Post publisher had too much on Huffington's yoga and sleeping habits and not enough about how she operates her business. The Times, too, seems to be overly concerned with personal narratives this morning, educating readers at length about how Huffington and royalist competitor Tina Brown went to fancy London parties together in the 1970s and both dated older men, so they're friendly rather than cutthroat competitors. Whatever. The real question: How is either of these money-losing publishers going to attract advertising?

Last night we invited some of our readers (along with some Deadspin and Jalopnik devotees) up to our roof deck for a full on Oktoberfest celebration, sponsored by Beck's beer. There was an oompa band and various German-style foods and lots and lots of beer. We got to meet some great commenters and readers and get drunk and feel culturally enlightened about Germanic culture! Nick McGlynn, of Random Night Out and our video team, was on hand to document the stein-swilling, polka-dancing, chilly (it was cold!) debauchery. A video of the proceedings and a photo gallery are after the jump.

Remember those Budweiser "Whasssssssssupppppppppppp!!!" ads, that made you want to crush and kill everyone in your path? Yes, well someone has put the idea to use for the sake of good. We won't ruin the clip for you. We'll just say that this is two minutes of poignant political genius, and if you don't like it then you might as well just go live in a world in which you drink Budweisers all day with John McCain as Sarah Palin shouts "Whassssuupppp!!" in your ear, forever and ever. You must check it out kids:

If you were unfortunate enough to read all mainstream coverage of the marketing and advertising industries every day, you would—as I have—come to the conclusion that this financial crisis is the greatest thing to ever happen to the reporters on those beats. That's because all they had to do was write three stories: The ad industry outlook is bad. Nobody's buying bullshit ads that don't work any more. And, hey, everyone sure is advertising a lot of sales now! The marketing reporters at all the papers filed these stories weeks ago, and then took off on a leave of absence, probably to become hookers or drug dealers like the other smart people do during recessions. And now: ...their papers just reword those stories and run them day after day, until the Dow breaks 12,000 again. NYT today:

Let's play the game "Who said it, and about what?": "It was a silly gimmicky thing." "Ridiculous." "I was embarrassed by it. I think most people at Hearst were embarrassed by it." "I was embarrassed that the Esquire name was on it." "That wasn't great, that was just ridiculous." "This Mickey Mouse light clicking on an off. It's not an idea." "When will they learn, oh lord? How long will it take for them to learn?"

Deep down, the smokers among us knew that this day was coming: a new study says that warning labels on cigarette packs subconsciously make people want to smoke more. Does this mean the City of New York will stop running all those anti-smoking ads with the tracheotomy dude who can't swim any more and the amputee lady who lost her fingers? No, those are just good old-fashioned punishment. [Ad Age]

How did all those shady mortgage companies get America's finances all fucked up in the first place? By using the freakish amount of publicly available data about all of our lives to target those people who were the most needy, vulnerable, and ignorant, and reel them into unsustainable debt. Now that everything is screwed up, how are financial companies going to pull us out of this mess? The exact same way! Data mining is going just as strong as ever, and all these credit card and loan companies are really trying to bring in new customers now that their last round of customers have all gone bankrupt. Even the big credit rating firms like Equifax and Experian make huge money slicing up all of the information they have on everyone, classifying us into little demographic groups, and selling it to third parties who can then send disturbingly well-targeted (or just disturbing, period) pitches. One woman got dozens of credit card offers congratulating her on recently emerging from bankruptcy. Other people get letters from random companies that show how much the balance is left on their own home mortgage. Someone should be punched for this. Possibly these people:

If you've made a committment to live a greener lifestyle, but you just don't know where to begin, perhaps you can take a cue from MTV's new ad campaign: The spot for water conservation features man, women and kids urinating in public throughout London. The ad campaign is only airing in Europe at the moment, but we look forward to a US version in the near future, if only to watch Bill O'Reilly turn it into a talking point about how America's youth has gone amok. The video is after the jump.

In the same way people thought television and movies and the invention of thumb-twiddling would kill the radio industry, people were convinced the iPod would be the thing that pulled listeners away from commercial radio forever. But they failed to anticipate how utterly lazy and uncultured Americans are! Radio gained millions of listeners last year; young people's time listening to radio rose 11%, while their time listening to iPods dropped 13%. The whelps love Bubba the Love Sponge, or whoever is on "the dial" these days! So then why can't radio make any money?

The Tivo users among us have decided that they no longer need to watch television commercials, but rest assured that their unpatriotic fast-forwarding will not go unpunished. The entire advertising industry in now engaged in nothing except figuring out how to make TV viewers watch ads whether they want to or not. The most popular method is to try to turn commercials into "shows" themselves, or mix up advertising and actual content so much that you have to watch both. But CBS is raising the question: what if the advertising and the content are equally annoying?

"Yahoo will almost certainly fire too few employees when it announces its mass layoffs this week," predicts Henry Blodget, the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to. Henry's got a bunch of charts you can look at, or you can read his kicker: "What's the smart amount of spending decline to plan for? We think about 10 percent next year and slightly more in 2010. We would also plan on the decline lasting at least two years."

Oooh, ad war escalation! You remember how Microsoft got so mad about Apple's ads that they had to run out and spend $300 million on a fancy ad campaign consisting of Mac lovers declaring their love for PCs, as well as celebrities doing things seemingly unrelated to computers. Meanwhile Apple has just been sitting back chuckling, and now they've released a new ad making fun of Microsoft's ad spending. Which is too insidery, but very entertaining to people forced to write about ad campaigns. Apple's only problem: the people who buy PCs, such as myself, don't even know what this "Vista" thing is. (If we knew about computer things we would have bought a better one!). I imagine that Microsoft grows ever more apoplectic, though. Full ad below:

Here's what you can expect in the coming year, internet lovers: lots of young internet companies going broke. The ones you love! Including, but not limited to, user-generated video sites, ad networks, fringe social media sites, and companies that make all those sweet apps. Why? Because in our brave new economy, companies are slower to buy bullshit ads of questionable efficacy on every random "Web 2.0" site. How bad will it get? We'll tell you: Ad Age predicts a small amount of growth:

You may have noticed that a large percentage of flat surfaces in America are currently occupied by those vaguely enraging tri-panel HSBC ads, where identical images are given different captions to prove that—I suppose—HSBC does not believe in a Kantian sense of moral absolutism. "A child: Love. Responsibility. Welfare Fraud." Now the bank is sponsoring this week's entire issue of New York magazine, meaning you'll have more than a dozen new chances to soak in HSBC's triumvirates of relativism. But considering the timing, it's worthwhile to ask: "Banks sponsoring entire issues: Smart. The Future. Monumental Fuckup?" This issue has been "in the works for several months," meaning that the bank sure as hell didn't know it would be running in the midst of The Great Depression Pt. 2. HSBC says it's all very "timely and appropriate." Mm hmm. Regardless of the intent, the real question is, is this sort of thing wise? With a bad economic outlook for advertising in general, publications themselves certainly hope so. Banks are mostly wandering trying every possible ad strategy right now—from comedy to doomsaying—in search of something that's effective. They don't really know what to do. Shhh! But! The one thing we know is that the proliferation of media makes it increasingly hard for advertisers to get their messages out. So buying all the ad space in a magazine or on a website is probably just going to gain favor as a tactic. They just need to make sure they're not buying it in something that's about to fold. That would be embarrassing. [NYT]

Are you a weary office drone who chokes down a dry, overpriced sandwich from the local deli in front of your computer every day, wishing that you could take a full hour to relax and eat some quality food for once in your miserable life? Well the ConAgra corporation feels your pain! And in order to help you they've enlisted someone you, the little people, can look up to: Ivanka Trump. She is using a modern "blog" to reach all the depressed, overworked potential ConAgra lunch customers! It all began last week, when Ivanka, daughter of The Donald and main squeeze of The Jared Kushner, informed the public via some blog that she would soon be setting up a "lunch trade" to revitalize your boring existence:

Anonymous subway ad vandal Poster Boy hasn't let his newfound fame go to his head. (Maybe he has? We don't know the guy personally). He's still traipsing around subway platforms with an X-acto knife and a tube of glue, busily remixing posters while slack-jawed commuters stand by unaware, presumably. After the jump are five of his newest works—I have to admit that the "FART" one is the best of all:

There were "massive layoffs" today—amounting to 14% of staff—at Heavy, the guy-focused network of websites. Heavy has been on deathwatch recently, since it's become increasingly clear that the company's strategy of inflating its traffic figures by buying pop-up ads will not be enough to satisfy its big investors. This is a bad sign for those sites with flashy branding but little substance to build a strong base of regular visitors. The venture capitalists who sunk millions into Heavy two years ago thought that it's "Heavy Men's Network" could turn into something big among the coveted young male demographic. But apparently the company's ad network isn't making any money. The financial crisis is going to hurt the ad market even for strong sites. For shakier ones, it could be a death blow that even the grownup businessmen Heavy brought in to professionalize the company can't avoid. Heavy's optimistic statement today:

The "goofy white guy acting goofy in comparison to cool black people" is, in my mind, the single most annoying trope in all of advertising. Under the guise of (incredibly tired) humor, it purports to poke fun at goofy white people. But it's actually kind of racist. "Black people: so much cooler than us whites! Well, we'll just have to make do with controlling the power structure, while they maintain their supremacy in song and dance!" So I have to give extra special props to Holiday Inn Express for coming up with an ad that finally subverts this idea in a way that is not horribly embarrassing to everyone involved: The key to this ad's success: they got an actual underground rapper to write the lyrics, which you can tell by the use of the word "paradigms," which is mandated by law to appear once in every underground hip hop verse: Click to view
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In-the-tank ad industry people have, in a Time "The Person of the Year is YOU"-style ripoff, named Barack Obama "Marketer of the Year." He even beat out Zappos.com. Wrap your mind around that, America. [Ad Age]