If you're an energy company trying to get the public to like you, there's only one way to go: cute polar bears. Forget about the energy crisis. Look at the polar bears! National Grid has wisely picked the salvation of polar bears as its charity of choice, and they have a sweet website full of sweet animated polar bears. Even better, they have a TV ad to fulfill every kid's dream: a nice cute polar bear pet! They're all so cuddly and friendly, we wuv them. Shortly after this commercial wrapped, four children were viciously mauled by polar bears (NOT REALLY). Below, the adorable ad that will make you visit the Arctic for a polar bear of your very own. Yay, energy companies!

Some anonymous author is writing a book about how much the advertising industry sucks. Excuse me; it's about "where advertising is going." But he wants YOU, the insider, to tell him why the industry sucks. And he'll pay you $200 an hour to do it! Well, if your "half hour tops" of "the sewage that is in your head" makes the book, he'll give you 100 bucks, pro-rated. "Don't even edit it," he says. OR, you can send the same story to us, we'll pay you nothing, but the satisfaction of seeing it published here will be even more sensational! A good sideline for the creative soul considering quitting the wicked industry for good. The full Craigslist ad from the lazy muckraker, after the jump:

Nerds may be polishing up their plastic light sabers and dusting off their Darth Vader helmets in anticipation of the new, animated Star Wars movie The Clone Wars, set to open in August. But you know who's not awaiting the movie? Pepsi, Kellogg's, and and Burger King, traditional Star Wars sponsors! Why not? "A spokeswoman for Pepsi, meanwhile, was unaware that a new 'Star Wars' movie was being released." Ha, this flick has BIG BUZZ going for it. Luckily for nerds, McDonald's and Toys "R" Us have stepped in to fill the void with all types of action figures fit for stockpiling by grown men. But it's never a good sign when key parts of corporate America don't even know your movie exists. Prediction: a big, animated suckfest. Still, fans are planning to line up at Toys "R" Us just for the release of the toys. Let's hope that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog makes it out to that one:

The now-famous but still anonymous American Apparel ad spoofer has always done his or her part to portray the hipster robot clothing company's ads as they are in CEO Dov Charney's mind: tasteful porn. The spoofer knows that the mandate to actually put clothes in his ads is just a necessary evil to Dov; he'd rather just see naked, self-stimulating, shaven women writhing around in space—perhaps accompanied by a cute animal. But now the spoofer is urging a return to the unshaven days of yore; a move that fits in with AA's faux-natural branding quite nicely. Clever viral marketing (doubtful)? Or just an unspoken call for variety in AA's secret full-on nude ads, to be unveiled as soon as society is ready for them? After the jump, full photos of the spoofer's latest porny—yet natural—line drawings:

Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy, still remembers when his show got pulled from Fox. Then it came back, and now it's one of the network's biggest hits. But even though the FCC lets him make edgy jokes now, it will never allow him to make edgy enough jokes. So MacFarlane is teaming up with Google to distribute a new, top secret internet show that will change everything and make him the most fabulously wealthy poop joke maven the world has ever seen.

VBS.TV (Vice magazine's online video channel) has an 8-part series called "Illegal LA" about the illegal immigration issue. The setup is to tell the story through the eyes of several key figures on different sides of the issue—including pervy American Apparel CEO Dov Charney! It raises an interesting point: though Charney is the neurotic head of our nation's most annoying fashion line who enjoys playing with himself in front of reporters, he is also one of the only entrepreneurs in his field with a truly progressive labor policy. Should he be forgiven for the first because of the second? No, but at least he has a mark in his favor on the balance sheet. After the jump, two clips featuring Charney's take on this unjust country of ours; and, as a counterpoint, a new spoof American Apparel ad that graphically reminds you of the evils of spandex.

Activists in Philadelphia are upset about an ad campaign for Colt 45 malt liquor—specifically, its cartoonish wall murals in poor neighborhoods showing party people living it up while swilling 40s, with the slogan "Works Every Time." One woman tells the AP she wouldn't want her daughter looking at it because "She might think it's cool." Which is a reasonable response from a parent to ads for everything from malt liquor to Bratz dolls. One would think that companies in the vice industries would have learned from Joe Camel that there is nothing to gain but backlash from cartoon-style ads, but apparently not. Colt 45 has an equally objectionable website full of cartoons, which also shows a fundamental disconnect with the rotgut company's own customer base; bird watchers (educated guess, here) are not really a cost-effective target audience :

When you see some random guy walking down a crowded street talking on his cell phone, lost in his own world, you probably think to yourself: there is a man I would like to smash right in the face. If a cell phone company were to find some way to successfully incorporate that feeling into its marketing plan, it would be genius. Instead, US Cellular goes and makes what is, by critical consensus, the most asinine cell phone ad of the year. That's because its premise is that that same man walking along yakking obliviously into his cell would actually make the entire world around him happy. Which just makes you want to smash him even more:

If you ever selected a plastic surgeon or LASIK doctor based on a random YouTube video, it's probably apt that that video only happened as a result of an under-the-table payment and the doctor was really incompetent and now you walk around blind and ugly. But what about the victims of the future? Plenty of doctors have gone right ahead and offered patients rebates or huge discounts in exchange for posting glowing videos about their procedures online, although something like that would be patently unethical in the "regular" media. Docs are like, "Huh, rules, really? I just thought it would be nice!" Patients are like, "Sweet, cheap surgery!" The loser is you, the affluent, narcissistic consumer. A couple of typical videos are after the jump; just because "a famous celebrity (name undisclosed for privacy)" gets LASIK from Dr. Feinerman doesn't mean you have to, too:

People today: they're all angry! There's taxes, politics-hell, the little man is getting screwed left and right! Corporate America understands and empathizes with your anger, and would like to encourage you to channel it into the constructive area of commerce. "On some fundamental level everyone's sick of everything, economically, politically," says one ad agency exec. Fortunately, skilled advertisers are able to take this vague and unsubstantiated insight into your psyche and put it to use by making just the type of ads that you want to see: angry ones! Just look:

If you go to the "Our History" section of the Aunt Jemima website, it gives a rather whitewashed rundown of key moment's in the company's long life. It was founded in 1889, and 100 years later, "the image of Aunt Jemima was updated by removing her headband and giving her pearl earrings and a lace collar." But what about the image of Aunt Jemima, say, six or seven decades ago? Did she still "stand for warmth, nourishment and trust"? Well kind of, but it was more of a nourishment and trust of racism. Embrace your past, Quaker Oat Company! We dug through the archives for some classic Aunt Jemima ads from the 1940s, and it's true what they say: "Happifyin' Aunt Jemima Pancakes Sho' Sets Folks Singin'!" About racism!:

Let's say up front that the super-prestigious Cannes advertising awards are, like most awards, a bit of a scam. They're a for-profit operation that charges ad agencies a lot of money to enter, and in return bestows something that the agencies can use in their own marketing materials. Plus they gave an award to those crazy sexist beer ads this year, so their judgment is obviously fallible. Still, the ad industry considers them a big deal, and they're a good guide to what's considered important in the field. So it was extremely groundbreaking when an online campaign (rather than a TV campaign) won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes this year. On the other hand, maybe it was just because people love Japanese dancers?

Heinz has pulled its innocuous mayonnaise ad showing two men kissing that had Bill O'Reilly so apoplectic. Score one for continued heterosexual condiment dominance, yea! [Times UK, Previously]

Just like you can block pop-up ads on your computer, you can also buy software to block porn, if you wanted to do that for some odd reason. But that very software has to have its own ads—preferably ads that incorporate porn, for clarity's sake! You can see the quandary. One German porn-blocking company solved the problem with some strategic Photoshop work [UPDATE: A concept pioneered at Something Awful], and the result is so creative you almost want to buy their purifying product just to applaud the effort (not really). Two of the company's ads, via Copyranter, are after the jump. They're perfectly SFW, as long as you don't use any imagination.

Whether you ever noticed or not, the fact is that MTV has never accepted political ads. Sure, it's always been rife with promo spots of musicians screaming at you to Rock The Vote, but actual candidate ads were never allowed (although they were allowed at fellow MTV Networks stations Spike, Comedy Central, and VH1). But now it's time to put on your listening hats, young voters, because that's all changed! MTV has announced that it will accept political ads, which of course is part of their commitment to engage the youth in the democratic process, and not just a greedy attempt to get their claws on lots of Barack Obama's sweet, sweet money:

People still profess confusion about which ad man had his way with JC Penney's image, making an unauthorized teen sex ad and submitting it to the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Neither the pissed-off retailer nor its apologetic ad agency would name names, and Ad Age yesterday concluded, "Just who is responsible for creation of the ad... is a bit cloudy." But it's not, really. Is it? It's got to be Mike Long, of Epoch Films. Read why, and watch one of Long's other "fake" Penney ads, this one a bit terrifying, after the jump.

Neil Patrick Harris is a fun guy. Many of us have known this for a while. The openly gay actor has proved himself a witty good sport, from his self-mocking turns in the Harold and Kumar movies, to his brassy work on CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, to his frank sex talk on Howard Stern's radio show. Now, it seems, even the straight dude advertising world has caught on. Harris is being featured in a new ad campaign for Old Spice, that old-timey manly man's line of deodorant, aftershave, and other men's products. A gay dude hawking Old Spice! The gay problem is solved!

The fantastically transgressive teen sex ad yesterday from middlebrow retailer JC Penney turned out not to be sanctioned by the company, predictably. That was just too much to hope for. But the fun part now is watching the fallout-after all, can you fucking imagine how pissed the JC Penney people are right now? They are very pissed. They company sent us a statement disavowing the ad last night, and now the ad agency has just sent its own statement explaining how it had, uh, nothing to do with this salacious underage sex production. Now we're just waiting for the third party-who is likely getting screamed at very loudly right now-to take responsibility. Official statements from the two main players after the jump, and our prediction for the next one to come:

Zimbabwean dictator and overall monster Robert Mugabe is one of the world's top bad guys. But if you're running an ad agency in Zimbabwe, hey, work is work. So a firm called Imago—owned by Young & Rubicam, the US ad giant—made a bunch of ads for Mugabe's "re-election" campaign. Now Y&R is falling over itself to cut its ties with Imago, possibly because Mugabe's wickedness has been front-page news in the US for the last week. The fun part: the ads sucked big time! Especially the one that looks like a wicked political acid trip. And we have the evidence:

"'Sounds like I've got $4 million coming my way,' the Naked Cowboy, whose real name is Robert Burck, told The Post upon learning of Manhattan federal Judge Denny Chin's decision." [Post]