Hasta La Creative!

Charmin’s public bathrooms in Times Square that were such a hit last year are back, with a microsite, maps and train directions. NY Times blogged last month:

“The restrooms — along with a plush waiting area — occupy a 12,000-square-foot space on the mezzanine of an office tower 1540 Broadway, between 45th and 46th Streets. The restrooms have luxurious features like wainscoting, hardwood floors, crown moldings and — new for this year — Kohler plumbing fixtures. About 200 workers (18 to 30 working on each shift) are available to clean each restroom after each use.

The Times Square program grew out of a Pottypalooza, a marketing effort that began in 2001, in which Charmin drove a 53-foot trailer, fitted with 27 toilets, around the country, to events like the Super Bowl.”

The first installment took about a year to plan.

Here’s a video of what the bathrooms looked like last year (and another one from a grateful reviewer).

It is probably against Facebook’s TOS*, but slapping an affiliate banner on your profile page is fairly easy – get an account with a service such as LinkShare, register with a merchant program, grab an ad unit (a linked image), get MyHTML application (I think SuperWall would work, too, but I haven’t tried), copy-paste the code, and you are in business. Similarly, you can embed a simple pixel-based traffic counter from a service like StatCounter.

Or you could drive traffic to your blog by installing the Blog RSS Feed Reader application that posts daily summaries of your headlines to your mini-feed for all the friends to see.

Are we going to see more profile spam that is so ubiquitous on MySpace and in the darker quarters of YouTube? Don’t know; the lack of anonymity on Facebook is kind of a game killer.

On a related note:

NY Times: “More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages — despite the social networking site’s rule against such ads. They are posting them with the help of a Montreal-based company called Weblo, an advertising network that sells ads onto people’s blogs and social networking profile pages.”

In July, Mashable put together a list of 5 ways to make money with Facebook that included Amazon affiliate links and selling services with micropayments.

*From Facebook’s TOS: “In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to […] upload, post, transmit, share or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, solicitations, promotional materials, “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” “pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation.”