Hasta La Creative!

Amber Lee Ettinger — better known as Obama Girl — is seriously amazing. She didn’t just shake her ass for politics; she turned that ass-shaking into a recognized brand.

Mini. Not for arachnophobiacs I guess. :))

Advertised brand: MINI Cooper S
Advert title: Courage
Headline and copy text: Courage. Take a test drive.

Advertising Agency (Name, City, Country): Lowe, Zurich, Switzerland
Agency website: http://www.lowe.ch
Creative Director: Florian Birkner
Art Director: Frédéric Nogier

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Throaties illustrate the dangers of loosing your voice – it’ll make teeny tiny speech bubbles when you really need to scream. 😉

Agency: DDB New Zealand
Executive Creative Director: Toby Talbot
Art Director: James Conner
Copywriter: Christie Cooper
Account service team: Sophie Martignier, Keri Aves, Greg Jones.

Illustrations: The Craft Shop

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Lots of open browser tabs today:

– Inspiration for the week: Easy PB&J Jar, a peanut butter jar with lids on both ends.

– An excellent compilation of brands with presence on Flickr

– Virtual Greats is a new company that plans to merchandise celebs’ likenesses in virtual worlds. Done right its a gold mine. A story in Variety.

– Debris, or stop cramming your blogs and sites with useless widgets.

– An interesting take on the e-card idea: send online notes that self-destruct after being read.

– Bic, the company that brought us disposable shavers, is working on cell phones.

– You are what you tweet: psychologists asked students to type up their thoughts for 20 minutes, which was enough to predict major personality traits.

– Yearbooks are dying out.

– Animated visualization of Wal-Mart growth in the US since the first store.

– My Million Dollar Movie: a filmmaker is selling frames in his new film (here’s the site).

The annual E3 convention is, of course, every gamer's dream conference. We couldn't go because we were busy twittering Ad Age's Madison & Vine Conference. But if you can't go, you better hope a guy like Peter Kang can. The Ogilvy West group creative director and his team at Ogilvy Digital Labs are videoblogging it, and we'll be posting all the videos on DigitalNext.

Seeing as AdFreak has become a meeting place for Corey Haim fans, it seems only fair to give Corey Feldman some attention, too. Here he is in a new PETA ad with his wife Susie, who, as Copyranter points out, will appear nude in the next issue of Playboy. Haim fans everywhere will be relieved that Feldman wasn’t offered a role in PETA’s “Pleather yourself” campaign.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Ad-agency honcho Linda Kaplan Thaler will join outspoken marketing executive Julie Roehm on "Jingles," a new CBS game show that has gone into production. Kiss bass player and tongue wiggler Gene Simmons will also be on the judging panel.

Conventional wisdom has it that Gary Busey is crazier than a sack of weasels. (Check out the 197,000 hits for Gary Busey and crazy on Google.) Perhaps it’s an act. Whatever the case, it gets him commercial work from companies that have little to lose. Recently, we saw him promoting the video game Saint’s Row 2. Now, he’s filmed 40 new off-the-cuff spots for something called GotVMail. An e-mail sent my way says the company’s “young founders, Siamak Taghaddos (26) and David Hauser (25), reveal that Busey’s connection to their company is in his first name, as ‘Gary’ is the name of GotVMail’s mascot.” Hard to argue with that. I didn’t watch too many of the spots. In fact, I stopped after the one above, in which Busey utters the phrase “stupid, misfortunate placenta.”

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Symbols, trademarks, icons, logos. What’s their true value? Following up on Johnson & Johnson’s lawsuit last year against the Red Cross over the latter’s familiar symbol, here’s a thought-provoking story from Colombia: At least one member of the military team that rescued 15 hostages long held by FARC rebels reportedly sported the Red Cross symbol on a bib or vest. That’s a violation of the Geneva Conventions and possibly a “war crime,” as such deception could pose a risk to humanitarian workers. What better camouflage for troops than the global insignia of rescue and comfort? On the other hand, when battling thugs who trade in terror, torture and violence, should governments be expected to play by the rules? Shades of grey abound; any answer might be qualified by countless Wal-Mart asterisks. Far from the boardrooms, design studios and glitzy TV suites of our media-driven world, a symbol can actually represent life or death.

—Posted by David Gianatasio