Hasta La Creative!

LONDON – VO5 is using two rising MySpace artists to give street cred to its new extreme style brands in a £3m marketing campaign that breaks on Monday.

LONDON – The Birmingham Post has today launched a new version of its website as part of move to publish news online before the publication of its print version.

LONDON – Annual performance figures for Royal Mail have been criticised by Postwatch, the industry’s watchdog, following a summer disrupted by industrial action that caused the first-class delivery rate to plunge far below its target.

Suddenly feeling the urge to give people bags to carry around, Mother in London, in its typical jokey way, instead came up with a line of “uncarriable” bags that you’d theoretically be embarrased to tote around with you. And they are fun indeed. See the whole collection over at Neatorama. Who wouldn’t love a Texas Gay Republicans bag (well, besides John Manlove)? That Phil Collins fan-club bag is pretty good, too. Even classic jokes like the sperm donation center and a fried dolphin stand get some play here. It’s only a matter of time before they make a bag for Federal Breast Inspectors.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

Although we’ve seen just about every holiday become commercialized, smaller ones, like St. Patrick’s day, don’t seem to gather much attention from bigger brands. That looks like it’s changing. Just look at what Puma’s created for the Irish holiday on March 17.

The Puma Sky 2 sneakers are green wit…

This list of crank diets illustrates, if nothing else, how willing Americans are to try any weight-loss methods except the correct ones. While most of these are innocuous, calorie-cutting schemes, there are a few ideas, like the tapeworm diet (parasite yourself thin!) and the Russian peasant diet (bet those starving proles never have to squeeze into their summer pants), that sound utterly unworkable, as well as insane. (And did the tapeworms really come “jar packed,” like it says in the old ad shown here?) The real kicker is the diet where you’re injected with urine from pregnant women, which is apparently some kind of fat-blasting nectar from Olympus. It clearly doesn’t work, because nerds have been consuming pee under a different name for years now, and most of them are still fat.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

Tired, perhaps, of choking on the noxious smog that hangs over Detroit (look, it ain’t Vermont!), Campbell-Ewald is launching a green-marketing practice called Garden. From the release: “Garden will help marketers reflect their environmental initiatives in messages that connect consumers’ needs with client products that contribute to a greener planet.” Awesome! There’s something called the “Garden Grow Process,” and “social audits” are referenced. Also, staffers will apparently be fired for drinking bottled water. Though I could be wrong about that, because I wasn’t really paying attention. Here’s a trippy clip from The Magic Garden. I used to watch it when I was in pre-school. C-E’s announcement made me think of the program: Every day in the garden was happy and peaceful and filled with song. Will they merrily sing “How Dry I Am” at C-E when the new eco-friendly water dispensers break down? (OK, I still watch The Magic Garden. There, I zinged myself. Happy now, C-E?)

—Posted by David Gianatasio

(TrendHunter.com) These are pictures of entries in a speaker design contest by C4DCafe. The designs are mostly meant to be aesthetically pleasing and some of the gadgets were made to be more for decoration than for functionality. Some of these speaker prototypes definitely look kind of weird. Still others are really …

LONDON – Microsoft is looking to mend historic rivalries between web designers and developers in a viral marketing campaign that sees a designer and developer duel it out.

LONDON – LinkedIn, the professional social networking site, has launched a web application to allow its members to access the site while on the move via their mobiles.