So earlier this summer, Nike upset certain gays and their allies with an ad showing a basketball player dangling his balls in another guy's face, bearing the slogan "That Ain't Right." And everybody got so pissy about it that the company pulled the ad, which even we were surprised by. But that was just one in a series of similar Hyperdunk ads—and what's the point of pulling it when, as Copyranter points out, other ads in the campaign that are still on display might be considered even worse?* EWWW:

Hoping to stop us all from talking about the Palin-McCain ticket anymore, Barack Obama's campaign today released an ad attacking John McCain as an Old who admits he doesn't know how to use a computer or send an email. A campaign official told Politico the commercial is designed to "underscore that John McCain can’t bring about change when he is completely out of touch with the lives of regular Americans." Of course, all of us real 'mericans know computers are just for "glib, articulate, fancy, dancey, prancey" liberal elites.Click to view

Boy, $300 million sure buys a lot of storytelling. Microsoft has released two more 90-second ads starring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, the Laurel and Hardy of... Microsoft ads. More than the first, totally mystifying "shoe store" ad, these new spots flesh out the plan: Bill Gates as lovable icon. He's like Joe Isuzu with a bad haircut! He does the robot! We're still skeptical, but it's progress. You can watch the two official ads here, but we like this version even more: all the footage of the two ads (and some extra that was edited out) in one four-and-a-half-minute long unfolding storyline. Trippy:

The entire music industry is slowly becoming a simple extension of corporate marketing programs—but at least most companies are forced to pay a lot of money for their new pets. Taco Bell, though, has learned that it doesn't take that much to have an "indie" (Ha! Ho!) group cosign your company. The souls of musicians used to cost at least a bag of heroin; now, an entire band can be purchased for as little as a Chalupa value meal!

It's time for the second spot in the Crispin Porter & Bogusky-produced advertising campaign for Microsoft and Windows Vista. Unlike the last one, there's even a computer! Premiering in two parts during tonight's episode of Big Brother on CBS, the premise posits mundane comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates staying in a Seattle home with "real people" (like veteran actor David Costabile) in order to connect with consumers. Cue the hijinx. The question is, will the campaign work?I may well be too far down the rabbit hole to have any idea if the spots are having the desired warm-and-fuzzy effect on the populace. If anything, they serve to remind us of the opposite: That Gates and Microsoft are so out of touch, the company has to pay an advertising agency $300 million (and Seinfeld $10 million) to lend even the thinnest veneer of approachability. "Cool," presumably, would have cost extra.

There's an episode of Mad Men (I told you I must relentlessly mine this show to catch up with every other ad writer) in which Sterling Cooper has to come up with an ad campaign for a stimulating "weight loss" machine that actually owes its popularity with women to the fact that it's an undercover vibrator. Cue the euphemisms: "Rejuvenator," "youthful glow," etc. Today, of course, euphemism is dead. The agency would sell the product with "Turn it on and cum!" So it makes us wistful to look back on how they sold embarrassing things in the good old days. (With sexism!). After the jump, classic ads that gently persuaded your grandparents to choose the right brand when they were feeling... not so fresh:

Nike is one of those companies that can be irritatingly press shy when you want to write about them but gets antsy if the media ignores it for too long —a case in point being the Olympics — because they have some superstition by which they must spend 11% of their sales on pointless exercises of what it calls "demand creation." (This is like funding one and a half 2008 presidential campaigns every year!) And so because Nike employs a lot of hypercompetitive, marathon-runner-type overachievers all hopped up on Portland caffeine and suffering from a profound lack of purpose*, every few years someone there decides "Just Do It" is not doing it anymore somehow.Maybe the slogan isn't "translating" to an imagined demographic or psychographic of shoe wearers they are trying to target.** Maybe AdBusters made fun of it and they are hurt. Whatever. So they "soft"-launch a new slogan that is invariably totally lame. Last time it was the Special Olympics-y "I Can" and aside from that being totally lame they got sued because someone else thought of it first. But this time the new slogan, targeted at young women in Europe, could be even worse. Because it is: Here I Am. First thought: am I the only Catholic who sees this and thinks, "Be Not Afraid" would actually be a better slogan if you are going to dip into the hymnal, Nike? Okay sure, probably I am, but second thought: Just do it contains the critical imperative phrase "Do it." And you can't deny the many virtues of "do it," no matter how much you hate companies that serve as neat little microcosms of the horrifying redistribution of income globalization hath wrought, because to "do it" is awesome. But to "do it" with someone who is all "Here I Am" about it is a total bonerkiller. It's just so emphatically…passive, right? Maybe I've just got the McCain campaign's recent reference to dead fish on the brain but I am also pretty sure this slogan could be interpreted to be demeaning to women, although I am going to quit now before I actually get a headache.

When you watch The Real World on MTV, don't you often wish the episodes were only five minutes long, focused mainly on computerized digital art, and full of awesome Hewlett-Packard products? No? That's cause you're out of touch with the youth of today. Luckily MTV and Hewlett-Packard are in touch with what's hip, and are bringing this fantasy "Real World Of Kids Looking At Computer Screens" to life! Could this be the best digital art-focused corporate co-branded semi-reality advertainment vehicle ever? YES, if Moby has anything to say about it! The totally tubular new series is called Engine Room, and is thoughtfully sponsored by HP itself. It follows in the footsteps of classic HP-sponsored MTV branded entertainment video series like Meet or Delete and Dorm Storm. Remember those? Yea! HP is seriously spending "tens of millions of dollars" on this show. Try to ignore this focus-grouped lineup!:

My distinguished colleagues at Daily Intel are in something of a snit today over some recent cameo-casting news from the cruel temptresses at Gossip Girl. On an upcoming episode of the unpopular teen soap will be, of course, a party. And at that party will be two editors from In Style magazine, making cameos as themselves. Also making cameos will be dozens of brand-name products. Then all of that will be tied up in a nice little bundle and covered in the magazine as a "real event." Whee for awkward, product placement synergy! But it's not the first time it's happened on the show. After the jump, we'll take a look at four other cameos, of people and things, that have appeared on the show and rate their Product Placement-ness, on scale from one to ten.

Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy is here! Half of you are like "GOD, I hate that nonsensical hack and his stupid storyline-lacking Family Guy." The other half of you lie, "Yea, me too." This new project doesn't hide the Burger King sponsorship, but these cartoon shorts actually fit MacFarlane's style better than the TV show; there's only time for one joke, so a storyline is a moot point. Seeing these things all over the web will only speed up the looming (unjustified) MacFarlane backlash, but we'll go out on a limb and predict: It will make him a(nother) shitload of money. The first two shorts are after the jump. Dogs and video games are the stars, naturally:

A brainwashed American might look at Mr. Clean and think to themselves, "A man used as an icon in cleaning product advertisement rather than the stereotypical housewife. That's the opposite of sexism!" Try turning off the television propaganda some time, Yankee imperialist! The European Parliament has taken up the burden of righting the wrongs of the advertising industry, by decrying grossly sexist images like the gender-dominant Mr. Clean:

Click to viewIn this clip, CNBC's Jim Goldman asks Apple CEO Steve Jobs what he thought of Microsoft's new ad featuring Bill Gates and comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Watch the clip: Jobs answers Goldman's question politely, but the CEO's body language says what he won't. He shakes his head. He throws his hands up in the air. He grins and laughs. Like the rest of us, the guy who greenlighted the Mac vs. PC series, the Think Different campaign, and the infamous anti-IBM 1984 ad doesn't get what Microsoft was thinking running that thing either.

Last we heard from sources on Madison Avenue, Google's TV advertising business was a joke. Only 200 clients had signed up for it in almost a year. Its ad targeting tech, unlike Google's sophisticated Web ads, judges whether or not an ad is relevant based on whether viewers click away while it plays, even though Google itself says 96 to 97 percent of the audience stays tuned in to a channel no matter what ad plays. So why did NBC today announce it would let Google play middleman for its cable networks, which include Sci-Fi, Bravo, Oxygen, MSNBC and CNBC?Easy: Google TV exec and Michael Steib used to work for NBC. Leaning on old colleagues is one of his favorite tactics for getting ahead, Steib told Crain's when the magazine named him to its list of "Forty under 40":

The olden days were full of free-flowing psychoactive drugs, grotesque torture machines for the advancement of human beauty, and creepy children intent on eating anything in their path, judging by the advertising way back when. From a longer list at Weirdomatic, we give you seven classic ads to make you glad you live in our modern age, when Ritalin has replace Nembutal as our drug of choice for small children:

Well, our faith in the reliability of photography has been shattered, a decade after it should have been. The porny American Apparel ad spoofer, whose sexy ad remixes we have thoroughly documented, has been revealed as an art project by the graphic design aficionados who run Stereo Hell, as expected. More importantly: the spoof "posters" plastered throughout the city, and on AA stores, weren't posters at all; they were just Photoshop mockups. They existed only in imaginary pixellated form! No wonder none of them ever turned up on Ebay. I suppose this says something about the true nature of art; but I must admit that the achievement seems less impressive now. There is no Santa Claus either, btw. After the jump, two Photoshopped photos of the spoofer's final big reveal. We'll miss you, you fake bastards:

Ever since they started allowing kissing in Bollywood movies, boy, India's morality is going to straight to hell. The cow-filled conservative nation is seeing its Victorian standards of sexuality crumble in the face of racy foreign advertising. The prime offender? You guessed it: Axe Body Spray. Of course. The Indian government recently banned Axe's infamous "Chocolate Man" ad, which it sees as a symptom of cultural decline, along with all the new sexy billboards popping up across the country. Welcome to the First World, India: Where products are plentiful, sex is empty, and Richard Gere can kiss your women with abandon. After the jump, the ass-eating Axe ad that was too hot for Mumbai. There is no stopping it:

It may well be within the realm of human achievement to make an ad for Hair Club For Men that does not cause an involuntary shudder of revulsion. But this is not that ad. This is an ad where a bald man goes to Hair Club to grow a curly mullet, and is then fawned over by his own comely "stepdaughter." "Is that your stepdad...oh my gosh, he's not too bad looking!" Christ, why, why? All the disturbing subtext you can fit in one minute:

"Most companies would have to spend a billion dollars on advertising to get this kind of attention," a brand consultant insisted to the Wall Street Journal in response to Jerry Seinfeld's what-the-huh 90-second TV spot for Microsoft. "The fact that they have the blogs, the business community and mass media talking about it means they hit a nerve," says another. "It's exactly what we were trying to achieve, which was to drive buzz," says Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla. Three's a trend! But ask yourself how many other companies will now intentionally develop campaigns designed to get people talking and talking about how disappointed they are with the whole thing?

NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly appeared in an IBM ad for free, and now "watchdog groups" are upset because IBM "reaps untold benefits from the reputations of Kelly and the NYPD." Uh, the price is probably right. [NYP]

Dying of anticipation wondering what Esquire's unwieldy new flashing E-ink magazine cover of the future will look like? Anticipate no more! Here's a video of its hypnotic, nonsensical flashing slogan: "The 21st Century Begins Now." Calendar not included.