Hasta La Creative!

LONDON – The BBC has publicly laid out its support for allocating assistance to its commercial rivals, in an attempt to fend off the threat to the licence fee.

John McCain, the man who doesn’t use a computer and has his wife tend to all his computing needs, has launched a Facebook game called Pork Invaders.

Kmart says it’s more fun in your underwear. That is if the word were made up of perfectly toned, 20-something hotties.

LONDON – News International has announced that it is to appoint a chief marketing officer across its group amid a number of other management reshuffles, as reported in Marketing last week.

Come on. You know you can remember it. You were in high school and your boyfriend or girlfriend was on the way over to visit and the anticipation was killing you

The Spore Creature Creator, part of the marketing campaign for the video game Spore, has only been operational since last Tuesday, but already it has spawned an entirely new genre of slash: Spore porn (dubbed “Sporn” by Wired’s Underwire). Encouraged to make their creatures dance, users instead are making them do more unmentionable things—hardcore, softcore, lots of it amateur, much of it anatomically baffling. If you’re interspecies curious (and not at work), type Spore porn into YouTube. So, is this a cautionary tale about the perils of user-generated content, or a great promotional tool in disguise? It all depends on how evolved Spore’s PR team is.

—Posted by Rebecca Cullers

LONDON – UK brewer Greene King is launching a new website for its Old Speckled Hen ale brand.

"No 'Stairway' … denied!" But what if there was "Stairway," in commercials for cars or even prophylactics? In the latest issue of Portfolio, Miriam Datskovsky asked how much the song is worth and how much it could be worth if the Zeppelin people finally licensed it out to a marketer. Sources estimate that it could net up to $8 million dollars for use in one campaign, provided they sell out before all the Baby Boomers find their own … ahem … personal stairways.

This spoof trailer for pulp film Night Hunger is actually an (unofficial!) ad ploy for guess-which-fried-chicken-company. (Catch subliminal brand action around 1:25.)

LONDON – The Digital Radio Working Group, DRWG, has failed to set a switch-off date for the analogue signal in its interim report, released today, but has urged larger FM stations to begin to migrate to DAB with total migration completed by 2020.