Hasta La Creative!

LONDON – Virgin Media has tied up with 4th Screen Advertising so it can offer brands cross-platform advertising for their mobile campaigns.

Woof. This is sure to sell some … wait, what are they selling? Oh yeah, who cares?

Talk about “flat-proof.” Thanks WB.

We’re accustomed to Olympics-themed ads that urge the athletes on to victory. It’s a sign of how unusual things are this year that a full-page ad ran this week in The New York Times urging at least one athlete to “speak up for Tibet.” Placed by a group called Students for a Free Tibet and its allies in the International Tibet Support Network, the ad directed athletes/readers to a Web site, which in turn suggested ways they could display solidarity with Tibet while at the Games. Among the proposed methods: shaving one’s head (in tribute to “the thousands of Tibetan monks and nuns who have been killed or jailed leading nonviolent protests in their homeland”), raising the Tibetan flag or dedicating a medal to Tibet. If nothing else, the possibility of such actions will add suspense to the often-tedious medal ceremonies.

—Posted by Mark Dolliver

Keep your kids away from the terrifying hot dogs! That’s the message of this PSA from the Cancer Project, a group that wants all processed meats—which apparently increase one’s risk for cancer over the long term—removed from school lunches. Of course, hot dogs aren’t exactly Joker-caliber villains, so the ad tries to act tough in a different way: by having the kids straight-talk about the cancer they will suffer later in life. Which only serves to remind us yet again how annoying the kids-talking-like-adults advertising gimmick has become. These PSAs are airing in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Joi Ito, an activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, spoke at Fortune’s Brainstorm event in Half Moon Bay last week.

Rebecca MacKinnon, frustrated with the blind optimism found in Silicon Valley, wrote about it.

Joi warned that not all kinds of capitalism lead to greater freedom or spread wealth and opportunities to everybody. “The capitalists aren’t really that helpful, generally,” he said. It depends on the business model deployed which really depends on the social intentions of the people running the business, and how much they care about long-term social and political repercussions. “We’re forgetting that we had to fight to create an open Internet.” Venture capitalists, he said, “assume that the Internet just works… that’s very irresponsible,” and they’re not thinking about how specific business decisions impact overall levels of freedom, openness, and inclusion. “We have to do more than just run around chasing deals.”

I think the same thing can be said for the ad business. Like technologists, we have a lot of power, but we don’t think about the harm we might be doing or the decided lack of a moral compass in our shops and clients’ businesses. That’s a flaw.

LONDON – Virgin Media and mobile ad agency 4th Screen Advertising are launching a joint venture to handle mobile ad campaigns.

LONDON – Tim Brown has been appointed as the new chief executive of Postcomm and will replace Sarah Chambers in September.

It ain’t exactly a flying failwhale but I think this is the first time I’ve seen all of AdAge down due to system maintenance.

Looks like system maintenance pages are the new black. Have you seen any good ones lately? They’ve made a comeback – it used to be commonplace in the late nineties, but then someone seems to have started the trend “keep the site up no matter what” and maintenance would happen in the background not changing cached pages in the very front of a site. Looks like we have a 90s revival going on here as I keep running into maintenance pages. Either that or me and every sysadmin on the planet are awake and working at the same time.

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Far be it from me to question Julius Erving’s medical credentials, but we’d love to know the scientific procedure that was used to determine that Dr Pepper needs to be consumed slowly, as the former NBA great suggests in this new ad. Same goes for Dr. Frasier Crane, who dishes out similar advice on his radio show in another ad. Both spots are part of a big new campaign touting the drink’s 23 flavors. How many fake doctors does it take to come up with 23 synonyms for “sugar”? Sadly, two of the field’s brightest stars have burnt out: Dr. Zachary Smith could have made awkward, possibly gay advances toward Dr Pepper to test its potency, and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson could have just blown up cases of the stuff with homemade explosives. No amount of slow-motion three-pointers could match that.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

Lacking any semblance of a life, I decided to compare Google and Cuil. I did the most basic (read: lazy) test possible by typing each search engine’s name into its rival’s window. The top Cuil hit for Google was the Google homepage. In fact, the first half-dozen results yielded parts of Google’s site. When I typed Cuil into Google, however, it spit back a bunch of news stories at the top, before the Cuil homepage link. The top story was an unflattering eWeek item: “Cuil Needs Time, Users to Fight Google,” followed by stories headlined “Cuil Is Cold” and “Google Is Cooler Than Cuil.” Not wanting to give in to conspiracy theories, I tried again 12 hours later. At about 7 this morning, the top Google hit was another news story: “Google Should Take Privacy Lessons From Cuil.” Only one interpretation is possible: Google wants to remind us that it knows all and will share our information whenever it likes with whomever it chooses if we are disloyal and use Cuil, which sucks, according to Google, and Google, knowing all, couldn’t be wrong. So let me close by saying: Forgive me, master, for straying from the path! Big G will probably accept my panicky apology … unless they research my thoughts on Sergey Brin. I sure hope they don’t Google.

—Posted by David Gianatasio