this came across my desk and gave me a chuckle:

Ran across this interesting piece today, apparently artists Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf have wrapped in yellow plastic all ads, from billboards to placards, along a busy Vienna street, " deleting" them from view.

The piece is intended to stir thought and conversation about the over saturation of advertising. Not too surprisingly, the piece is drawing crowds who are then shopping in the now ad-less stores. So the piece offers both a complaint and an alternative solution, brilliant.

It boils my blood when I read about this nonsense. It seems a company called AdMission Corp. has just been granted an absurdly broad patent which covers, essentially, the very *concept* of community publishing, along with a host of other applications. More specifically, according to Sarah Pate, president and CEO, AdMission "This patent covers the efficiency of being able to do pre-processing on all sorts of media files, on all kinds of devices,"

Excerpting Kevin Newcomb's above linked ClickZ article, Scott Lewis, VP product strategy at AdMission says "If you want to understand where it would apply, look for any case where you have lots of media being collected," Lewis said. "If you look at portals, they tend to have a whole set of functionality ranging from auctions and classifieds, to personals, to instant messaging and e-mail, to communities and blogging -- all of which utilize photos and other files collected from billions of remote contributors. You can look at those examples and start to extrapolate the impact."

This covers not just their process mind you, but the very idea of formatting media from multiple input sources. So all you bloggers out there, get ready to pony up, everyone with a photo album online or a friendster account, open your wallet or you're stealing from AdMission!

Stumbled across a web based political marketing effort today in the form of cartoon series called Republican Survivor. The title pretty much sums it up, a handful of high profile republicans are depicted playing a version of Survivor. Registered viewers (free to register) can watch weekly webisodes and vote off a member of each week's loosing team.

The project is sponsored by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and while some will chuckle at the caricatures and bumbling antics of the "stars," the content is pretty tame by web standards but still too over-the-top to be of interest to anyone other then those already in the anti-Bush corner.

In addition to the entertainment content, the site contains other factoids intended to paint the republican party in a negative light. The sight also asks viewers to spread the word about the sight through "tell a friend" forms and such. I'd give it 3 (of 5) stars as a marketing effort and 3.5 for content.

I stumbled across a new ad campaign from Discovery Channel today and it may be the first use of video in an internet ad that I actually like. The ad is a standard skyscraper with a prompt to "rollover" a portion of the ad which launches a small, attached window that plays a short commercial. It doesn't hurt that the campaign is witty, but it's the fairly passive use of video that I like. It gives the advertiser the depth of video while giving the user (and publisher) a less invasive experience. Kudos to Discovery and whomever developed the ads. I am sure it is running in many places but I saw it on MediaPost

I don't know how far Burger King's Subservient Chicken is spreading beyond the marketing community but marketers are certainly abuzz over it.