So where will this trend end? We've had head-vertising, ass-vertising, and tadoos (okay, tadoos were a hoax). So it shouldn't be any surprise that one woman is pioneering pregnant-belly-vertising on eBay. Is there any part of the body that advertisers won't pay to plaster their message on? Probably not. But is this woman going to walk around with her belly showing? Even if it's cold outside? It is Winter, after all.

Even though I'm not very proficient in Spanish, I'm pretty sure that the Emancipator Bubble is a hoax. According to the machine translation, the Emancipator Bubble "is an inflatable cockpit, with bubble form, that allows you independent living without leaving the familiarity of your house." In other words, it's a large inflatable bubble that you live in, instead of just living in your room. It comes in various models, such as the Sexmancipator. This racy model is "Made with a plastic similar to the latex and with an interior permanently lubricated. It incorporates a small vibrating motor. It is totally soundproof towards the outside." I think the concept of the Emancipator Bubble is a marketing concept dreamed up by a bubble gum company. (via We Make Money Not Art)

Check out this ad for the Volkswagen Polo (link may be dead) that's been going around. A suicide bomber blows himself up inside the car, but the car is so tough that it contains the explosion. Seems to push the envelope a bit too much to be an actual ad commissioned by Volkswagen, and sure enough it's not. It's a 'spec ad', created by leeanddan.com. Spec ads are 'speculative ads' created to show potential clients what kind of work you're capable of doing. In other words, Volkswagen never endorsed this material.
Update (1/20/05): The Guardian reports that they were able to track down Lee of leeanddan.com, who did indeed make the VW Polo ad. Lee says that he wasn't working for Volkswagen, but implies that he made the ad to get Volkswagen's attention. Reportedly the ad cost £40,000 to make.

Hot on the heels of the latest guy who was auctioning off advertising space on his forehead, comes this eBay entrepreneur who has invented Forehead Ad Blockers.

there is a new type of advertising that is rapidly gaining ground: forehead advertising. These ads will be inescapable, especially if you have to visually interact with that soulless human posing as a walking billboard. That is, unless you have: The Forehead Ad Blocker™
Portable! No heavier than a standard pair of safety glasses!
Adjustable! Blocks forehead ads regardless of their height! Just raise or lift your head!
Patent-pending technology!

(via Adrants)

I realize that Ikea gives some of their products strange names. At least, the names sound strange in English. In Swedish I'm sure that they sound perfectly normal. But you would think that somebody in the company would have realized that calling a children's work bench the 'FartFull' wasn't the most astute marketing move. Though kids will probably like the name. I'm pretty sure this isn't a joke because the product is right there on Ikea's website.

Here's an interesting piece from a newspaper about the burgeoning market in Coca-Cola Fantasy items. One of the paper's readers wrote in to ask whether their Coca-Cola belt buckle designed by Tiffany Studios and showing a nude woman sitting on a crescent moon was of any value (unfortunately there's no picture of the item). The paper's reply: No, because the item is a fantasy fake:

[This] is what Coca-Cola collectors call a "fantasy," which is a piece that never existed as an old item, was not used in advertising by the Coca-Cola Co. (nor sanctioned by them), but is a modern creation meant to appeal to collectors or to mislead the unwary. There are literally tons and tons of these Coca-Cola "fantasy" items out there, lurking in flea markets and at garage sales. The variety seems to be endless, and belt buckles are one of the favorite items to be made as "fantasies," and many of them feature nude women, including one extremely tasteless and offensive example that has the representation of a nude nun of all things!

Nude Nun Coke memorabilia. I may be twisted, but for some reason that seems more interesting to me than the authentic Coke stuff.

Joey the Midwife is an advertising agency. An unbelievably cheap advertising agency. How can it offer such low rates? Simple. "Here's our secret: We have developed the use of "themes" to sell products. Why reinvent the wheel with every ad campaign? We've got a collection of themes that are PROVEN winners.... themes everyone loves. We just plug your product into a theme and PRESTO BINGO, you've got a world-class ad campaign at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time." It's a very strange little site. I think it's the creation of cartoonist David Rees, author of Get Your War On, since a lot of the links lead back to his site. But I'm not sure why Rees created the site.

Here's a video of a guy trying out for a part in an action movie... but things don't go well for him at all. The guy performs so badly that you'd suspect the scene was staged, but apparently it's a real audition tape. Waxy.org did some detective work and discovered that the man in the video seems to be stuntman Mark Allen Hicks, and the video shows him auditioning for a Nike commercial with Allen Iverson and Jim Kelly. Reportedly Hicks left the audition with a bloody nose, and the next few stuntmen who auditioned were told not to do any flips.

According to the Independent, researchers have proven that the difference between Coke and Pepsi really is all in your head. Apparently the popularity of Coke's brand image causes people to think Coca-Cola itself tastes better, even though it really doesn't taste very different from Pepsi. As the article says: "When asked to taste blind, they showed no preference. However, when the participants were shown company logos before they drank, the Coke label, the more famous of the two, had a dramatic impact: three-quarters of the tasters declared they preferred Coke." I've long suspected this. Personally I can't taste any difference between Coke and Pepsi, but I have a friend who swears passionately that there's a huge difference. Now I can show him this research to prove that he's simply been brainwashed by advertising. Oh, and the Pepsi Taste Test also turns out to be nothing but hot air: "The findings suggest there is no scientific basis for claims made during the Pepsi ad campaign in which testers purportedly chose Pepsi over Coke when they were not told what they were drinking."

Peptalk seems to be positioning itself as the mobile phone service provider of choice for Dutch marijuana lovers. Check out its website, pepyouraddiction.nl, where you can see that its corporate logo is a hemp plant. Marijuana is, of course, legal in Holland... and PePtalk is a Dutch company, but the weird thing is that beyond that PePtalk doesn't seem to have any rational connection to marijuana. It's as if they just liked the idea of being a pot-lover's phone company... without offering pot lovers any benefit from choosing their service over another. As this article at Strand Reports notes: PePtalk do not actually seem to express any views on cannabis on their website - other than their name and logo. And although they offer many premium rate SMS services, none of them seem to have anything to do with daily cannabis prices - or where you can locate your nearest cannabis coffee shop!  But maybe that is in the pipeline?

Banner ads for JDate, the Israeli dating service, promise to match Jewish bachelors up with attractive Jewish women. For instance, one ad shows blonde-haired, 22-year-old Hila from Tel Aviv who's "looking for a single Jewish guy." Another shows 26-year-old Sharon who's looking for a Jewish husband. But as it turns out, there is no Hila from Tel Aviv. The woman in the picture is actually Hungarian porn star Kari Gold. And Sharon? She's really Devon Sweet, a bisexual model from the United States. Neither Kari Gold nor Devon Sweet are affiliated in any way with JDate (so no luck meeting them that way). Their pictures were just randomly collected on the internet. I guess this is another shocking reminder that advertisers sometimes bend (or completely disregard) the truth.

From the Hoax Forum: Ever heard of Life With Skippy? It was an American television show that aired briefly in 1969 that featured "the misadventures of two small-town boys, the trouble-making Skippy and his sidekick Gummy." Unfortunately it got cancelled after only six episodes. Still don't remember it? Well, if you look around the internet you can find a surprising number of references to this hard-to-remember show. It's mentioned on message boards, there's a Yahoo Group devoted to its young star (who was later found dead in a brothel), there's a Life With Skippy website, and a website maintained by the actor Adam Felber who played Gummy. Plus, you can buy the hat worn by Skippy on eBay. Well, if you still can't remember the show the reason is that it never existed. It's the creation of a New York-based production company, Metropolis Entertainment, who are trying to promote a new sitcom they've developed called Life After Skippy, which is about the career of a down-on-his-luck former child actor (who once supposedly worked on Life With Skippy). Quite an elaborate guerrilla marketing campaign they've put together for this. You can view clips from the real show, Life After Skippy, on their site. Some of them are pretty funny.