In a matter of moments (10/20/09 @ 11am MDT), Tony Stewart will sit attached to a real polygraph and spill the beans on his feelings about Whoppers. And, while he’s at it, he’ll answer a slew of visitor-submitted questions. And he’ll have to do all of this truthfully. Watch Tony under real pressure: TruthAboutTony.com.

And in Advertising news, Pfizer has put the Viagra account up for review. Finally. I’m so sick of the thousands of e-mails I get every day for V!agra and I can’t believe it took Pfizer so long to pull the plug on McCann’s shenanigans.

I did read, also, that if the account stays up for review for more than 4 hours, they’ll have to consult a doctor.

Damn, these jokes could go on for hours…

Image courtesy of: http://www.thefringething.com

In keeping with good ‘ol user-commanded interactive online adfotainment (a là Subservient Chicken – which is amazingly still live), the Edinburgh Fringe Festival has launched a micro-site with a curious eggish-looking object the begs the user to poke and prod at it with various typable instructions. Two gentlemen (presumably?) in full-on bunny suits take your instructions and apply them to this thing. It’s lovely, hilarious, and incredibly fun.

The Fringe Festival itself is an annual Edinburgh venue for hundreds (really, hundreds) of troops putting on thousands of un-vetted, wildly artistic, and often brilliantly comical performances at makeshift stages throughout the city. It was formed in 1947 to provide organization for the 8 uninvited theatre troops who showed up to the Edinburgh International Festival, but were not able to perform under that umbrella. According to the edfringe.com website, “The Festival Fringe Society (commonly known as the Fringe Office) does not produce any of the shows, does not invite anybody to perform, does not run any venues and pays no fees to performers. We do, however, help performers every step of the way.” So, talk about free range and organic.

Which is what this object seems to be- an endlessly fun (well, at least until you run out of commands) egg to play with for no particular reason at all. Well done, well done indeed.

A particularly interesting article on NYT.com today describes one of the most bizarre media buys I’ve ever heard about. In Google’s relentless (and arguably noble/criminal/insane) efforts to digitize every book that ever was, the search giant found itself running up against the law. Copyright holders settled a class-action lawsuit with Google over the digitizing and online publishing of protected materials, and as part of the settlement Google will charge customers for the materials and pay the copyright holders a percentage. Seems like a fair deal.

However, this is where it gets interesting. The reached agreement, still subject to court approval, says that Google must make “reasonable and practicable” efforts to find the authors of the works in question to allow them to opt-out of the digitizing process. Because it’s an opt-out system, and because the world of books is, well, huge, it has meant Google has to make a proportionally huge effort to find these people. The Internet itself doesn’t even hold the names and contacts of all the authors of the world’s obscure titles. As such, Google is spending $7million on legal-notice ads in newspapers around the world. 

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A recent post on Gizmodo.com demonstrated yet one more way Google has tapped deep into the modern psyche and is revealing our true thoughts, desires and fears. You may have noticed the “auto complete” function when typing in a Google search, but I, for one, have never bothered to stop and read the suggestions. Well, for someone who works in the media business and is always fascinated by what people are doing and thinking (and, by extension, Googleing), I thought I might play around with it a bit and ask the almighty indexer a few questions of my own. Here’s a selection of what I found.

First, I thought Google might be able to show us our true curiosity. By collecting the most basic inquisitive human sentiments I was hoping to see what people really want to know.

Why do…

• cats purr (217,000 results)
• men have nipples (456,000 results)
• dogs eat grass (370,000 results)
• men cheat (895,000 results)
• fools fall in love (794,000 results)

A little bit of slap-happy humor is always a good thing.

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Holy mother of all things sacred, this has got to be the worst promotional video ever – not to mention how horrid the product itself looks. And Beamz? Even the name is fugly. Who would make such a thing? Even Sharper Image didn’t sell crap this bad. Anyway, I dare you to watch the whole video.

The Consumerist reported about an Absolut ad that’s running in Mexico. And because of it, not too surprisingly, a few Gringos have their panties in a knot. For clarification, this ad is referring to what was once the US-Mexico border prior to 1848. It doesn’t astonish me at all that some Americans find this distasteful, but I find swipe pretty hilarious. With all this American Mexico-bashing and these grotesque exhibits of xenophobia, I think it’s pretty called for. Regardless, the ad really doesn’t matter north of the border. It’s a Mexican ad for a Mexican target audience, and I imagine the Johnson family in their gated community were rightly left out of the discussion when this was getting brainstormed.

Reminds me of this ad that ran in Oregon:

Speak to your target audience, and learn to take a joke.