Hm, how to grab shoppers' attention in the cavernous Mall of America, without having to pay some kid $7 an hour to stand there passing out fliers? A hologram man, sent from the future! It's only a matter of time now until Terminator-like robots patrol our nation's food courts, gesturing menacingly with their whirring appendages, their fixed gaze wordlessly urging you to check out the new Sears bathmat sale at the price of your life. For now, though: Best Buy employee holograms. Watch the ghostly salesman give his ever-repeating spiel, below: Click to view
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[via Adrants]

So yesterday we posted what seemed to be a new work by the anonymous American Apparel ad spoofer—this one featuring Obama being menaced by a big dick, with the familiar slogan "The Assassination of Barack Obama" and an American Apparel logo. Then we heard that it might not be a work by the actual spoofer, which was confirmed by the spoofer's own blog, then confirmed again by Copyranter, who thinks the Obama piece is a Photoshop fake. Now the spoofer himself has sent us a statement, of sorts, saying he welcomes copycats as long as it's clear they're different copycats (and he's not a Dov Charney employee, thank you):

We have to say this for the porntastic anonymous American Apparel ad spoofer: he or she is just so god damn aware of the vagaries of pseudoculture that it is impossible not to admire his or her attention-getting sensibility. Unless, of course, this all turns out to be paid for by Dov Charney, in which case you can expect a very sternly worded rebuke from us. So watch out. Today, the personal (wear) becomes political; it's The Assassination of Barack Obama as imagined not by a publicity-seeking artist Yazmany Arboleda, but by publicity-seeking artist "anonymous spoofer." And of course a big dick is involved, for reasons we can't quite understand:

The iPhone 3G hasalready outsold the original iPhone. One reason for all the success? False advertising, says the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority. The ASA has told Apple it can no longer air an ad claiming the iPhone accesses "all parts of the Internet," since the iPhone's Safari browser can't access Web sites that use Java or Flash. "Because the ad had not explained the limitations," reads the ruling, "viewers were likely to expect to be able to see all the content on a website normally accessible through a PC rather than just having the ability to reach the website." The naughty ad, below:

Hard to believe our nation's star athletes have time to go to the gym and practice jumpshots or whatever, what with all their marketing strategy meetings and reality shows and plotting to invade China like the second coming of opium. Sports stars and their sponsors have known for years that China is the market of the future-"If only 1% of Chinese buy our sneakers, that's $300 million more in revenue blah blah..." just like every other business in the world. But the Olympics have whet athletes' appetites even more. They want to rule China. The question is, why is China letting them do it?

Hey, Denver has its own angry ad blogger, like a minor league Copyranter! His take on shitty creative briefs: "There are the 'emotional/rational reasons to believe'...I’ve seen 'none' in that space." Heh. At least they're honest. [Denver Egotist]

Sign of the times: Iowa-based publisher Thaddeus Computing is killing its 11-year-old Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine. In its place, the company will publish a new title, iPhone Life. Why the change? It's not about which phone is more popular. It's about advertisers.Publisher Hal Goldstein says that despite 20 million Windows Mobile phones sold in the past year, there's not enough of an ad market for Windows Mobile. Microsoft and cell-phone companies aren't willing to spend on ads in the mag. Moreover, he says, today's smartphone makers aren't like the old PDA companies — think HP — who were willing to bundle a magazine with their products. Goldstein has obviously sniffed out an iPhone accessories ad market to replace his no-longer-subsidized Pocket PC coverage.

Sigh. When we asked earlier about the upcoming book about ramen and love, a commenter asked if we were in fact referring to the Korean ramen commercial that's, um, shot from the point of view where it looks like the woman is giving a man oral pleasure. Why no, we weren't! But we dug up the video. She's just eating ramen noodles—get it? GET IT? (Basically SFW but who knows.)

Transgender nightlife queen Amanda Lepore is inarguably awesome in her fabulous cartoonishness. Now the "My Pussy" singer is part of a Jawbone Bluetooth advertising campaign, which isn't so surprising when you consider she's also done advertisments for M.A.C. Cosmetics, Swatch, Armani and MTV. The ad appears in this week's New Yorker—is America ready? They sure as hell better get ready. In her words: "My pussy is famous; my pussy is expensive." [Copyranter]

An ad agency lets you destroy its old website with a gun of your choice. That's not bad. [via Adfreak]

One good way to create a website is to pay a single agency just enough money to do the job, put them on a tight deadline, fact check the content, and then publish it. Easy! Many people who are incompetent in several vital areas of life-human interaction, for example-have nevertheless managed to start and run successful websites with few start up costs at all. But the nation of Italy decided, hey, why don't we do the opposite of all that, and see how much money we can burn through in pursuit of a conceptual online fiasco? So they did! Italy wanted to build a website to market the nation to prospective tourists. The cost so far: $66 million over five years. And it doesn't even exist yet! Among the problems: Too many cooks in the kitchen ("Several government ministries — in two administrations — and each of Italy's 20 regions were involved in creating the portal"), a product that went live in 2007 full of embarrassing errors, databases that weren't compatible with each other, and a logo purchased for $150,000 that was eventually discarded for sucking too much. A consultant tells the WSJ that the government could have had an agency complete the entire project by now for around 2% of what's been spent. Try Blogspot.com, yo. [WSJ]

Michelle Obama is scheduled to speak at the Democratic Convention in about an hour. It's the first thing any reasonable number of people will care about at the big political show in Denver. When the speech ends, and talking head spin mode begins, everyone should remember the TV people are completely desperate to conjure news at the pointless, made-for-media convention. Here's some evidence, in the form of a CNN segment that seems to be hinting that Pepsi controls the Obama campaign and entire Democratic party, because of its logo.

Steve Stoute is Jay-Z's partner in Translation Advertising, and specializes in connecting huge corporations to "urban" celebrities for ridiculous amounts of money. Such as R&B star Chris Brown's secret deal to make a song all about Wrigley's gum, but not tell anyone until after it was a #1 hit! "It's incredible that an artist was nominated for a Video of the Year with a Wrigley's jingle," says Stoute. Yes, quite. "And 'selling out' today, he adds, means creating inauthentic relationships between pop culture and product." Oh, I thought it meant "The Slogan On Steve Stoute's Business Card." [Adweek]

When Alex Bogusky, the ad guru for Burger King and Domino's Pizza (among others), announced last week that he is publishing a diet book, the general reaction was, "Ha, hypocrite Whopper-seller." An alternate theory, though, is that the book is part of some elaborate hoax, or will turn out to be the peg for a new Bogusky ad campaign. But if it is, he's doing a good job keeping it a secret; Burger King and Domino's, the two fatty food-touting clients most obviously affected by the book, had to find out about it by reading a news story:

You thought that Rafael Nadal's pensive, shirtless pose on the back cover of New York magazine last week was just one more coup by the mag's upscale media trendsetters? Think again! Nadal himself-or, more accurately, his corporate overseer Nike-is in the midst of remaking his entire image, shifting it from that of a wild young ball-slinger to something "more mature" (and better able to sell polo shirts). The first casualty: his capri pants. Sorry, ladies:

Someone is lying at Nike. The only question is who. The mystery surrounds how the shoe company approached the thuggish Chinese dictatorship over online rumors about an athlete it sponsors. No one disputes that Nike, which recently claimed its shoes have "become an icon of self-expression and a symbol of Democratic style," ran to the repressive regime in a snit. Someone claiming to be close to Nike had issued an anonymous Web post claiming the company forced Liu Xiang, pictured, to exit the games because he was unlikely to win. This echoed tampering allegations Nike also faced in Brazil. Does Nike want the poster hunted down and thrown in jail? Hunted down and unmasked, so he can be sued? Or simply handled by the Chinese government in whatever manner it feels appropriate? No one has any idea, because Nike keeps changing its story — and digging itself into a deeper hole.

Have you seen any of those dozens of YouTube videos where a dude in a lab coat puts random things in a blender and proves that, yes, they will blend? It's a successful viral advertising project! So successful that the company claims that "sales have risen 600% since the videos started." The Times points out that most of the company's customer base is commercial, so it's highly unlikely the videos themselves are the reason for the increase. Still, this god damn blender company, of all things, is savvy enough to team up with AT&T to blend an iPhone, and to get itself into the top search results for "Chuck Norris" by blending an action figure, so you have to give them some props, ridiculous though their strategy is. After the jump, watch pop culture things blend for murky reasons:

The anonymous, sex-positive American Apparel ad spoofer's latest conquest: the windows and front door of an upcoming Soho American Apparel store. Verily, our wayward artist has decided to strike Dov Charney right where he lives. Is this further evidence that the spoofer might be in cahoots with the company-the manifestation of the CEO's inner desire for ads unfettered by his dreary clothing? It's time to reveal yourself, poster-person. Click through to see the, um, seductive (?) re-imagining of the store's entrance:

Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to buff the image of its startingly unpopular operating system, Windows Vista. Nothing so far has worked. Don't worry, Apple and Linux fans — Microsoft is not doing anything threatening, such as actually improving the software.Instead, the company is paying aging comedian and (reformed?) Mac enthusiast Jerry Seinfeld $10 million to be the product's spokesmonkey. At least one of the ads looks like it was shot against a Brooklyn backdrop by Michel Gondry, the french auteur beloved by white people. Who's responsible for this sudden rush to be hip? This sounds like the work of Alex Bogusky, the studvertiser at Mac-worshipping ad firm Crispin Porter & Bogusky. Guess Gondry won't be touring Apple stores to promote his next film. (Photo by AP/Franka Bruns)

The Olympic Games have long promoted more than the amateur athletic spirit. Sponsors this year sell pharmaceuticals, laptop computers and luxury watches, among other things, mostly to consumers outside of China. But there's something particularly sad about the way the games have been co-opted to push sugary treats inside the host country. Mars Inc., for example, used street sports events and other Olympic gimmicks to help grow sales of Snickers bars 75 percent in China this year, the Wall Street Journal reports for today's paper. Then there's Coke, which spread its tooth-eroding product into China's impoverished, soda-deprived rural provinces by attaching itself to the Olympic torch relay. That and some other local uses of Coke's $400 million in global Olympic advertising helped erode Pepsi's lead in China, the Journal reported on its front page Tuesday. Both Mars and Coke seem oblivious to the moral issues raised by their campaigns amid heightened scrutiny, in the U.S. at least, of obesity-linked products. If they're not more careful, American sugar purveyors may find themselves shackled in the fashion of cigarette makers. After the jump, a look at a scene from Mad Men, in which tobacco executives begin to grapple with the regulatory noose begin to close around their own advertising in the early 1960s.