We miss you, Chris. Thanks for doing it.

Uh. You're welcome?

Asylum gets this heart-rending explanation from the sniveling funnyman's publicist himself:

"When DIRECT TV came to me and the Farley family with this idea about 'Tommy Boy,' we talked and thought it would be a cool way to remind people just how funny Chris was. It is a clever homage to my friend and a movie that we loved doing, " he says.

"Nobody else wants to pay me money for things," he means.

Oracle's Wall Street Journal ad (above) said its database ran "faster" on Oracle's own Sun hardware —at "XX transactions per minute" — than competitor IBM's database and server combo. Some of our commenters insisted that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison must have had the "XX" numbers to prove his claim but was, as his ad seemed to imply, sitting on them until an Oct. 14 event.

But Ellison, known for commissioning ads about capabilities that don't yet exist, shouldn't have been given the benefit of the doubt. He's just been fined $10,000 by the benchmarking council Oracle belongs to "because Oracle did not have a [benchmarking] result at the time of publication."

Oracle has not submitted any current evidence to the TPC to sustain this claimed result. Oracle has been directed to cease publication of the advertisement in print or online.

Lesson: Never assume that Larry Frickin' Ellison, of all people, is being coy and modest. Larry Ellison does not do coy or modest. If he has numbers, he will use them. And then some!

[Via All Things D]

Facebook approves every advertisement on its site. But it didn't notice a watermark on one racy ad's picture, identifying it, Forbes says, as one from Jailbaitgallery.com, where the users had guessed the age of the two girls in the photo to be approximately 16 years. Jailbait Gallery apparently specializes in those sorts of votes. Lovely.

The ad promoted alumni networking site MyLife.com, and, according to Forbes' Taylor Buley, "showed two apparently underage blondes in low-cut shirts." MyLife ads on Facebook's current ad board, like the one above, still feature racy female pictures, but presumably of adults: The MyLife executive in charge of affiliate marketers, like the one who took out the offending ad, told Forbes, "a very small fraction of 1% of [our marketing] traffic... would be promoting those kinds of images."

He added, unimpressively, "We've been trying to get our arms around the whole policing aspect." Uh, OK. But surely Facebook is swearing up and down this won't happen again? "A spokesman says copyright owners can fill out an online form and Facebook will take action within 24 hours."

Got that, underaged girls? The best way to keep your pictures from being abused on Facebook is to be sure you're constantly reloading Facebook, according to Facebook.

(Image: A different Facebook ad for MyLife.com, without the "Jailbaitgallery.com" logo and presumably featuring an adult model. Via Facebook.)

Clearly meant to have a lively, "fun" feel, the painful video is so over-the-top bad we thought it first it must be a hoax. But Microsoft's in-house blogger has been touting these events, which are being organized by an apparently well-established marketing company that specializes in getting people to shill products to their friends at sketchy "house parties." Said marketing company owns the YouTube channel where this video appeared.

Microsoft has a track record of tone deaf commercials, but this marketing video somehow hits a new low. Maybe it's the way there's an undercurrent of tension and seething disdain even among the hired professional actors, as in this scene, about three minutes into the video:

Middle-aged white lady: I led an overview of some of my favorite Windows 7 features... It took, like, 10 minutes [approving murmurs]... It was totally, informal, like, everyone just kind of crowded around the computer in the kitchen [hearty laughter].

...After my overview, I went straight to an activity.

Older white lady: Oh, you went straight to the activity? I let everyone fool around with "Snap" [a Windows 7 feature] for a little while! [Uproarious laughter.]

Young black man: Me too! I did the same!

Middle aged white lady: I love Snap!

Older white lady: And then we started an activity maybe 30 minutes later.

Middle-aged white lady: Well, either way works, right? You figure out what your guests want, and play it by ear. In any event, we each did an activity, or two.

Angry party-pooper geek guy (white): Uh I did three activities. Ya.

Middle-aged white lady: Oooooh.

Young black man: Well, excuse me. [Snickering laughter.]

Middle-aged white lady: That's great! [Laughter] The activities each have you talk for a minute or so, and then...

Angry party-pooper geek guy (white): [Frowns, angrily slams down drink, walks over to get more food and stew in silent rage.]

Or maybe it's the way the video undercuts the very product it purports to be touting, by emphasizing the you should actually install Microsoft's operating system at least 48 hours before your... uh, install party. As in this scene:

Angry party-pooper geek guy (white): Of course the first thing you want to do is install Windows 7, right? [Boisterous, awkward laughter.] Now make sure you do that a couple of days in advance of the party. [Laughter silenced.] Call customer service if you have any questions. [Emphatically, this time, waving arms:] Got to play with Windows 7 before the party.

True. Nothing scotches an awesome Windows 7 party like catastrophic data loss, the Blue Screen of Death and impotent cursing. Person-to-person marketing might work for fun products like cosmetics, or cheap inoffensive gear like Tupperware. But operating system installs? Not fun, not trivial, and not the sort of thing that's going to liven up your kitchen. Device drivers? Crashes? Partitioning? Pass the tequila.

[via the Telegraph]

UPDATE: And of course, the parodies have already begun:

The ads were poetic ditties of white text on a black background. Like: "Blind girls never see you coming" and "Strippers Will Not Tolerate Disrespect (Just Kidding)."

But: Max, who seems to necessitate creative new suffixes being appended to words like "douche" on a daily basis—mostly by his fans—had his ads thankfully removed by Chicago's Transit Boards in a transit-based struggle that would make Rosa Parks want to rise from the dead to beat the piss out of Max for messing with her legacy of transit-based struggle.

Max responded in a release maturely and appropriately, handling the situation with the decorum and class we've come to expect from him: "Blow me," he wrote. Max was quoted as saying it was "the culmination of a two-month-long effort by angry anti-male groups." Also, this:

"...Women are not stupid. They would not support me if I hated them, and the fact that they come out in the hundreds of thousands to buy my book and go to my movie is proof that I not only love women, but my art is in fact pro-woman."

At first glance, less egregious is Tucker's intentionally inflammatory statement that his "art" is pro-women as it is as it is "art." But then, it all begins to make sense: this is performance art. Max's entire shtick is performance art. It's New Museum-level shit. In fact, Max probably knows exactly what he's doing, how people are going to react to it, and the exact amount of publicity it's going to generate. Which is why it's strange that, you know, he made such a shitty movie that nobody's going to want to see, and thus, make no money. So what would tie this all together?

The forthcoming revelation that Max is just a deeply-closeted homosexual, inching his way out by purporting the extremities of the most straight, blase, boring, stupid, and utterly predictable proto-male sexuality there is: his, or his act's. The kind given the treatment a "salon" of fellow "bros" out there could appreciate in the form of a book and its poop-like adaptation. Tucker Max could be the world's most interesting gay advocate out there if this thing comes full-circle.

Then again, he's probably just a dick. City of Chicago: good on you.

They've already been subjected to a wild animal baby, hipsters in a mud pit, and some dark black and white shit they probably smoke opium to in France, or whatever. Now this. "Stop thinking"? I think your ad sucks. At least they got some football pictures in there.
[Copyranter]

The campaign consists of a Web video in which the woman, Karen26, tells a foreign lover — she doesn't remember his name — that she's had his baby and hasn't slept with anyone since he left town. Along the way, Karen26 promotes the national nightlife and tradition of "hygge," i.e. fucking random tourists. The Twittering hordes have, naturally, been all over this.

As AdLand notes, the contrived storyline is not very original, even for guerilla marketing, but the locals are none too happy with the implication that Denmark is filled with "loose women and unprotected sex," and the spot has been pulled. That's a smart move, albeit for the wrong reason: We'd be far less concerned with the honor of Danish women than with the practice of encouraging annoying tourists to be even more annoying by asking endless winking questions about "hygge." No bar would have been safe, Danish ladies.

[via AdRants]

If you've been to the New York Times site today, you might've seen something different. Maybe a dirty little ad claiming that your computer was infected popped up? Peter Kafka at All Things Digital did.

It looks like they're running some malware advertising that's getting to some computers. You might've seen this kind of thing before while surfing for some gritty Internet, or as Kafka explains:

You generally have to travel farther down the Internet publishing food chain to find these kind of bogus ads - go hunting for porn and/or illegal downloads, for instance, and you'll find plenty of this stuff.

But Web advertising is still a wild and woolly place, and this type of thing still plagues high-end publishers too. Sometimes it's the fault of ad networks the publishers use to move their unsold inventory; sometimes the bogus ads are bought directly from the publishers themselves.

The malware ad looked like this:

And the notice the Times published went a little something like this:

Some NYTimes.com readers have seen a pop-up box warning them about a virus and directing them to a site that claims to offer antivirus software. We believe this was generated by an unauthorized advertisement and are working to prevent the problem from recurring. If you see such a warning, we suggest that you not click on it. Instead, quit and restart your Web browser. Questions and comments can be sent to adtraffic@nytimes.com.

Don't click on the bad thing! For those of you who have, and got your computer infected, you should send the bill to the Times and see if they'll foot it. Meanwhile, Kafka points out that, yes, the Times should be lauded for at least acknowledging the fact that they might've screwed up and let something bad slip by. Then again, when was the last time you saw something like this on the Post's website? News problems: they happen. Also, could be worse: seeing Malware on the NYT website is at least more exciting than reading an article about BrickBreaker on it. 

We're guessing that whoever arranged to place an ad for Halloween skeletons next to a picture of Apple's famously a gaunt CEO (click above image to enlarge) is already fired, or perhaps just severely spanked. Still, good luck getting Jobs to return to speak at your next lucrative D conference, Journal guys! (Maybe if you promise him it won't be a bare-bones affair...)

Hat-tip to iPhone Savior, which first posted this. PDF via WSJ.com.

Today, below a story about how Harvard received federal stimulus money, there appeared an ad signed by Bradley Smith, the holocaust denial movement's one man propaganda machine. Smith believes that future President Eisenhower and others fabricated the Holocaust in a bid to consolidate power and let Jews run rampant, or something. It's all far too insane to even entertain.

Anyway, his insanity was on full display on the Crimson's front page in today's edition, a departure from the school's previous stance on Smith. The blog Kitsch/Posh points out that the Crimson's editorial team in 1994 rejected Smith's questionable marketing campaign because the paper isn't a soap box. It's a news vehicle:

A newspaper is not an open forum, like a street corner or an open kiosk. It's a privately owned organization that sells its space. An advertisement, then, represents a business transaction–not a public statement.
...
We didn't want to sell our space to print a hateful message, regardless of its exact wording.

But that was back in the heady 90s, when selling out political views and general sensitivity was far more important than $1000 or so. Now the university has no money and has to take what it can get. And, of course, go whoring for it, as they're doing with their new clothing line. Gone are the days of elitism, yes, and in are the days of fringe-living and coin scrounging.

UPDATE: Crimson president Max Child pointed us to a newly published apology in which he and his team take full responsibility for what's simply a "mistake" and a "miscommunication"

His explanation:

We did not intend to run the ad-a decision we made over the summer when it was initially submitted. Unfortunately, with three weeks of vacation between submission and publication, that decision fell through the cracks.

Yesterday's advertisement was the result of that miscommunication.

Child understands, of course, that the article's subject matter was highly offensive and promises all the moneys exchanged will be returned. He also made sure to point out that the paper does not endorse all its advertisements. So, rest assured he believes the Holocaust happened. You can also be sure that whoever let this shit run will be fired, tarred, feathered and sent straight to hell.

While some shows, like Heroes, have tried to merge product placement and plot on the web, Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry and his crew are now bringing the trend into primetime.

The writer and others on ABC's payroll will help produce eight commercials for Sprint in which "Housewives" characters grapple with mystery, murder and general soap opera drama. Of course, none of the mainstay Housewives will appear in the commodity-driven mini-series. Rather, the actors in the commercials will appear as "background extras" on the actual show, which could be an ultimately embarrassing move for everyone involved.

NBC and Jay Leno, whose new show premieres tonight, are taking a slightly dated approach:

And an easy way to plug an advertiser in an era when TV commercials are at the mercy of the DVR. Leno describes himself as "advertiser friendly," and NBC has already struck a deal with McDonald's, whose Monopoly-based promotion will find Leno announcing the chain's ad featuring NBC stars. Visitors to McDonald's will be steered by placards to Leno's program.
...
Today's challenging economy could well rewrite the old ad playbook, says Brian Steinberg, TV editor at Advertising Age magazine. "We'll see how much he can weave into his show. Because when the ads are part of the program, you're less likely to hit the fast-forward button," he says.

Could this be the wave of television's future? Ads are the program and the programs are the ad? Even if it works, it seems to us viewers have grown up a bit — just a bit — since television's early years and will be turned off by such obvious attempts to buy their business. Or that's our hope, at least, for the increasingly blurry lines between advertising and entertainment must be preserved at all costs.

Attached is the ad Oracle ran in the lower right corner of today's Wall Street Journal. An early edition posted to the newspaper's website illustrates how Ellison likes to operate. Check out the highlighted bit — Oracle never bothered to fill in the data to support its certain conclusion. The attitude: "Definitely say we're way 'faster' on hardware from Sun, which we now own, than on IBM, which makes a competing database; we'll find some numbers later to prove it."

All tech moguls, to some extent, play this marketing game, but Ellison has historically been an especially egregious example; his brazenness, in fact, helps explain why Oracle, through a series of mergers, has come to utterly dominate the market for the most complex types of large corporate software.

An example: Ellison in the late 1980s commissioned an ad to tout a hugely complex clustering feature for Oracle database software — and did so before one line of code had been written to support that feature. This according to Mike Wilson's biography of Ellison:

About 1987 word got out that the Ingres database would soon have a sexy new function: It would be able to do distributed queries... Ellison told [Oracle ad man Rick] Bennett to prepare an advertisement announcing Oracle's distributed capability. Then he assigned an engineer to whip up a distribtued feature so the company would actually have something to sell when the ad appeared. Ten days later Bennett's advertisement hit the trade press: "Oracle Announced SQL*Star," it said. "The First Distribtued Relational DBMS..."

"The fact of the matter was Oracle didn't have anything," said George Schussel, the trade show promoter who had followed Oracle from the beginning. "But that was the way they worked. Everything was marketing, everything was image. You simply announced the product and then figured out later how to deal with it from a technological point of view."

Another time, Wilson writes, Oracle took out an ad implying, outlandishly, it had ported a competing database to the PC from mainframes — "IBM SQL/DS AND DB2 DBMS NOW ON PC," read the ad headline. Ellison "exploded" when an engineer challenged the ad, Oracle vet Kirk Bradley told Wilson:

"He said, 'All companies do this. It's standard stuff. You don't know anything about business.'"

It's somehow comforting to know that, while hot companies like Twitter, Google and Netscape may come and go, some longtime CEOs basically haven't changed for decades. Larry Ellison will always be a shameless truth-bender. Just like some of his closest friends.

UPDATE: One commenter supposes, quite plausibly, "They're going to announce the results at OpenWorld on Oct 14 and we're all supposed to tune in then to find out what XX equals." So maybe Oracle is doing the same fill-in-the-blanks thing it's always done, just in a very open and shameless way. Transparency. People do change!

UPDATE 2: Oracle has been fined over this ad, since Oracle did not possess any TPC benchmarks to back up the ads claim. Oracle was, again, hoping the facts would fit the claim, when said facts came into existence, which at the time of this ad they had not.