In a formal proclamation Monday, Bunten announced his city will be known as “Google” — Google, Kansas.

The unusual move comes as several U.S. cities elbow for a spot in Google’s new “Fiber for Communities” program. The Web giant is going to install new Internet connections in unannounced locations, giving those communities Internet speeds 100 times faster than those elsewhere, with data transfer rates faster than 1 gigabit per second.

Animal-rights group PETA is backing off plans for a billboard about pet-population control that poked fun at Tiger Woods’ sex scandal — after hearing from the golfer’s lawyers.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ message would have matched an image of Woods with this ad copy: “Too Much Sex Can Be A Bad Thing … for little tigers too. Help keep your cats (and dogs) out of trouble: Always spay or neuter!”

PETA told the Orlando Sentinel Wednesday that it was searching for an advertiser to put up the “fun, tongue-in-cheek” billboard near Woods’ home in Windermere, Fla., where his November car crash sparked a shocking infidelity scandal that led to last week’s public apology.

But yesterday a PETA spokeswoman said the plan was on hold “in light of conversations we have had with Mr. Woods’ attorneys.”

In the summer of 2001, 40 beautiful women whispered “save me” into the ears of men in San Francisco, dropped business cards into their pockets and promptly disappeared. The question, “Is it just a game?” was found scrawled in red lipstick on bathroom mirrors. Men dressed in black suits and dark sunglasses stood on the corners of busy streets during rush hour with cardboard signs that read, “The truth is majestic” and “They are watching you.” The bottoms of donut boxes sent to office buildings read, “Who feeds you your information?”

All were part of an advertising campaign mirroring the content of a new video game called Majestic. The brainchild of San Francisco-based Ammo Marketing, the campaign succeeded in generating press and users to Majestic. Part of this success, according to Martin Howard, author of We Know What You Want: How They Change Your Mind, may have been due to the use of buzz agents in the campaign.

Paid by marketing companies, buzz agents make up a subsection of the increasingly popular guerilla marketing strategy. But when phone, car or liquor companies secretly pay for this kind of marketing, it ceases to be the recommendation of a friend and becomes something more calculated: a seemingly invisible commercial.

Information on buzz agents, who are often actors, is scarce. Like most advertising campaigns, their target audiences vary based on the product they’re trying to push. The guise of the buzz agent is the mundane: a fellow bar patron ordering a specific brand of vodka, a tourist with a specific camera. Their guise helps capitalize on the vulnerability of innocuous conversations. Harder to spot than product placement or tattoo advertising, a buzz agent takes fleeting encounters and stamps them with invisible “this message sponsored by…” post scripts.

Some are easier to spot than others. In one of the more well-known cases involving YouTube, an Australian woman named Heidi Clarke beseeched the viewers of her video to help her find her Prince Charming. Hesitantly, Clarke explained she had met a man in a café, a “wonderful, smart, funny” man with whom she felt “this connection.” He departed before she could catch his name, but like any good pseudo-fairy tale left something behind: his suit jacket. Clarke went on to describe the jacket, its beautiful tailoring and quality, and that she was sure her mystery man would want it back.

The video turned out to be a hoax constructed by Australian marketer Naked Communications. The actress’s name was Holly Hardy, and although it’s brand name was never mentioned, she was advertising the jacket her mystery man had left behind. Hardy had previously modeled for Witchery, the company that made the jacket.

In the case of the Majestic campaign, the business cards slipped into the pockets of curious men led to a hotline advertising the game. The campaign got coverage from almost a dozen media outlets on the West Coast, resulting in increased sign ups for the game. The women did not disclose their identities.

The effectiveness of buzz agents lies in their ability to secretly insert advertising messages in everyday life…

[continues at Buzzsaw]

A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005.

THE STAT: HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.

Check out this campaign ad about “FCINO: Fiscal Conservative In Name Only” — the weirdness begins at around two and a half minutes into the video:

Internet chatter had led to speculation that it might be an urban myth — nothing more than clever digital trickery spreading via the Web.

But our friend Bob Collins at Minnesota Public Radio assures us he’s seen it with his own eyes:

There is a billboard along I-35 near Wyoming, Minn., with a huge photo of former president George W. Bush and this question: “Miss Me Yet?”

Now, the push is on to find out who paid to have it put up.

Bob says there’s no readily apparent claim of ownership on the billboard, so he’s heading back to the scene to see if he can find out who’s behind the message. He’s also got some local politicos looking into it. He’ll keep us posted…

The controversy surrounding a larger-than-life photo of President Barack Obama is stretching from Times Square to the White House.

Aides to the president are asking the company Weatherproof to remove its billboard in Times Square, which features a photo of the president in front of the Great Wall of China. The advertisement features the tagline “a leader in style.”

The White House says the billboard implies the Obama approved the product — adding there is a long-standing policy against using the president’s name and likeness for commercial purposes.

Weatherproof purchased the rights to the photo from the Associated Press.

The clothing company’s president says he did not think it was necessary to seek approval from the White House, since he says Obama does not directly endorse the product …

[continues at NY1]

How brilliant! How irresponsible! How stupid! Shield Security, a Dutch firm offering corporate and executive protection services, created these special suitcases with steel letter recruitment messages inside to entice airport security workers looking to make a career move. Brilliant—because, well, it’s the cheapest, most targeted ad effort I can imagine. Irresponsible—because, well, I don’t want people with the all-important job of airport security distracted from doing their goddamn job because they’re daydreaming of a better employment opportunity. And stupid—because, well, Amsterdam airport apparently doesn’t have the highest quality security personnel.

thanks animalnewyork

Ministers are facing fierce opposition from medical groups, teaching unions and children’s charities over plans to allow products to be used in television programmes for marketing purposes for the first time.

Critics claim the move, which broadcasters say will give them up to £140m a year in extra revenue, will fuel childhood obesity, exacerbate the problems caused by alcohol and gambling, and distort storylines by rewarding programme makers for deliberately giving certain items high visibility.

The British Medical Association has written to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) strongly opposing the plan. “The BMA is deeply concerned about the decision to allow any form of product placement in relation to alcohol, gambling and foods high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) as this will reduce the protection of young people from harmful marketing influences and adversely impact on public health,” says its submission to a DCMS consultation in the issue, which closes on Friday.

“By its nature product placement allows marketing to be integrated into programmes, blurring the distinction between advertising and editorial, and is not always recognisable. Studies show that children are particularly susceptible to embedded brand messages and these operate at a subconscious level.”

Read More in the Guardian

Friends of Science, a Calgary-based non-profit group, is running a national radio advertising campaign mocking the whole idea of climate change that has mainstream environmental groups miffed.

The groups are claiming that funding for the anti-global warming effort is coming from the oil and gas industry.

James Hoggan, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, lashed out Tuesday at Friends of Science in a speech in Toronto, calling it one of several “industry front groups” in North America that are trying to create uncertainty about the existence of climate change to undermine next month’s United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen.

The ads, which claim the planet has actually been becoming cooler in the past 10 years, have been running this month in 15 cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary, according to the Friends of Science group.

Predictions of Global Warming are Wrong

Listen to a Friends of Science radio ad

Download (.mp3)

A national campaign of this kind, if it featured 25 to 30 spots per day in each of the cities for its 30-second ads, would cost about $60,000 to $65,000 per week, according to an executive of an advertising agency, who did not want to be identified.

[continues the Globe & Mail]

Earlier this week, the US military revealed that’s it’s getting closer to realizing a fully operational squadron of robo-beetles for recon missions. But a couple of weeks ago, German publishing house Eichborn unleashed 200 “fliegenbanners” on startled conventioneers at the Frankfurt book fair. Ad agency Jung von Matt/Nectar says the mini-banners were designed “so that the fly could fly with it, but low and for short distances, constantly landing on visitors.” And I’m sure more than a couple of the winged mediums were then subsequently squished.

Steve Silberman reports in Wired magazine:

Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn’t introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.

In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck’s research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company’s reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. “To remain dominant in the future,” he told Forbes, “we need to dominate the central nervous system.”

His plan hinged on the success of an experimental antidepressant codenamed MK-869. Still in clinical trials, it looked like every pharma executive’s dream: a new kind of medication that exploited brain chemistry in innovative ways to promote feelings of well-being. The drug tested brilliantly early on, with minimal side effects, and Merck touted its game-changing potential at a meeting of 300 securities analysts.

Behind the scenes, however, MK-869 was starting to unravel. True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison. The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people’s health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology.

Ultimately, Merck’s foray into the antidepressant market failed. In subsequent tests, MK-869 turned out to be no more effective than a placebo. In the jargon of the industry, the trials crossed the futility boundary.

MK-869 wasn’t the only highly anticipated medical breakthrough to be undone in recent years by the placebo effect. From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn’s disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an “unusually high” response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late ’90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry into crisis. The stakes could hardly be higher. In today’s economy, the fate of a long-established company can hang on the outcome of a handful of tests.

Why are inert pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines alike? The reasons are only just beginning to be understood. A network of independent researchers is doggedly uncovering the inner workings—and potential therapeutic applications—of the placebo effect. At the same time, drugmakers are realizing they need to fully understand the mechanisms behind it so they can design trials that differentiate more clearly between the beneficial effects of their products and the body’s innate ability to heal itself. A special task force of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health is seeking to stem the crisis by quietly undertaking one of the most ambitious data-sharing efforts in the history of the drug industry. After decades in the jungles of fringe science, the placebo effect has become the elephant in the boardroom.

Kind of interesting, and I doubt this would ever happen in the United States. Eric Pfanner writes in the New York Times (Image via Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tollieschmidt):

Concerned that girls and women feel excessive pressure to live up to the digitally Botoxed and liposuctioned images of human perfection they see in glossy magazines, lawmakers in Britain and France are trying to push advertisers to get real.

Under their proposals, ads containing altered photos of models would be required to carry disclaimers.

“When teenagers and women look at these pictures in magazines, they end up feeling unhappy with themselves,” said Jo Swinson, a British member of Parliament from the Liberal Democratic Party.

The Liberal Democrats, the third-largest party in Britain, after Labor and the Conservatives, adopted Ms. Swinson’s proposal for a labeling system this month as part of their official platform. The party wants to ban altered photos entirely in ads aimed at children under 16.

In France last week, Valerie Boyer, a lawmaker from President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, introduced a similar bill in the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament.

She argued that altered images were undermining young women’s ability to control their own destinies. “These photos can lead people to believe in realities that, very often, do not exist,” she said.

In France, where the advertising posters in pharmacy windows can border on the obscene, there is growing concern about eating disorders, and many young women are obsessive in their pursuit of thinness. Ms. Boyer previously championed a bill to ban Web sites that seemed to encourage anorexia and bulimia. But that proposal has languished after being approved by the National Assembly last year.

In her quest to rid the media of misleading images, Ms. Boyer wants to go even further than the Liberal Democrats in Britain. Her bill would require warning labels on retouched photos published for editorial purposes as well as those in print ads. Violators could face fines of 37,500 euros, or almost $55,000, or up to 50 percent of the cost of an advertisement.