What’s that old saying, “sex sells”?  In the past month People magazine provided some strong evidence to back that credo by raising over $218,000 for charity through their “Sexiest Man Alive” auctions.  People partnered up with online charity auction leader charitybuzz, to offer readers a chance to bid on once-in-a-lifetime experiences with the sexiest men featured in their pages over the past 25 years.  The bidding ran from Nov. 17 through Dec. 15 and all proceeds benefited the celebrity’s preferred charity.

The highest bid of all the “Sexiest Man Alive” auctions was for the chance to meet Prince William at the Chakravarty Cup Polo Match.  Other experiences included a swimming lesson with Michael Phelps and a tickets to a Bon Jovi concert along with a meet-and-greet.  Some other celebrities that participated include Hugh Jackman, Bradley Cooper, and Ricky Martin.

Today on the mediabistro.com Morning Media Menu podcast, hosts Jason Boog of GalleyCat and AgencySpy‘s Matt Van Hoven welcomed Adweek digital editor Brian Morrissey, who talked about the work he does for the Adweek Web site aggregating blogs written by members of the industry.

Morrissey also spoke about the news that advertising is down and will most likely be down for years to come. “The big question for advertisers is…is this a cyclical thing or is this a structural thing?” Morrissey said. “If it’s a cyclical thing, advertising will be rebounding…and it might be a little worse than something the industry has been through before but it will rebound…But advertising might become a smaller piece of the economic pie. And that’s a bigger deal, because that’s a structural change.”

Also discussed: advertising in China, Michael Phelps‘ new post-marijuana allegations ad for Subway and The Washington Post‘s salon scandal.

You can listen to all the past podcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321.

Barack Obama may still be struggling to articulate his stance on gay marriage, but People has no issues whatsoever! Portia de Rossi and Ellen DeGeneres, who were married in California over the week-end, are the cover subjects of this week’s issue. Also, the only two people to beat Michael Phelps to anything.

For the first time this week (based on our totally unscientific survey, anyway) the Olympics are not dominating the homepage of the NYT. No doubt a temporary condition since Michael Phelps is set to go for his final gold sometime in the next hour. Still, a nice relief, even if the main story is about methadone.

Hey, a questionable timing decision at the Olympics that has nothing to do with NBC! So, by now everyone has heard about Michael Phelps‘s one one-hundredth of a second victory over Milorad Cavic in last night’s (or this morning’s) 100 meter butterfly (it was soclose the Serbs filed an immediate protest). But you may not have seen it, since to the naked eye one one-hundredth of a second is nearly imperceptible — even the NBC announcer conceded that it appeared that Cavic had won. Well, turns out the Times graphics editor Joe Ward was hoping to take a closer look and went to the Omega Pavilion (Omega is the official timekeeper of the Games) immediately following the race to get an underwater pic of the finish. Ha. IOC/FINA craziness ensues.

When Joe returned to our office, he received an e-mail message from the spokeswoman. “Sorry but FINA decided not to release any timekeeping images to the media…We are not going to distribute footage. We are not doing these kinds of things. Everything is good. What are you going to do with the footage? See what the Serbians already saw? It is clarified for us beyond any doubt…He’s the winner in any way. He’s the winner no doubt. Even if you could see the pictures, I don’t know how you could use them.

You know, it’s summer and there’s not that much of it left and soon enough it’ll be September and we’ll all have to return to the real world, or as close an approximation as the Internet allows. Now’s the time for Michael Phelps in speedo bathing suits, and allowing the National Enquirer its very short day in the sun. To that end we thought we’d do our own version of the Friday afternoon news dump and save all the bad news for one post that you can glance over before jumping on the Jitney, or whatever (in our case the subway, but still, it’s Friday!). So here you go. We’ll even put it after the jump for you.

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We’re not entirely sure how it’s only Thursday today and not Friday — probably some evil plan concocted by NBC to fool the entire country in order to make more money off the Olympics. Anyway, it’s August, and as much as we love gazing at Michael Phelps we need a break. To that end we bring you an entirely new sporting event, as exhibited by Gavin Miles McInnes, former Vice founder and currently one half of StreetCarnage.com. In our minds this is nothing less than an Olympian feat, and possibly should be considered as a future event. Synchronized pepper eating anyone?

The truth is that after Friday we mostly forgot to watch the Olympics (also known as Michael Phelps goes to Beijing, or alternately, President Bush gives new meaning to the term lame duck). Anyway, for those of you also missing the colorful (delayed) action the folks at Slate — who have obviously been suffering since the demise of the Hillary Death watch — are on the case. They’ve put together a “Olympics Sap-o-Meter: A scientific way to measure the sappiness of NBC’s Olympics coverage.”

After slogging through Olympic broadcasts of yore, we drew up a list of 33 syrupy words that NBC has chronically overused: adversity, battled, cancer, challenges, courage, cry, death, dedication, determination, dream, emotion, glory, golden, hardship, heart, hero, inspiration, inspire, journey, magic, memory, miracle, mom, mother, Olympic-sized, overcome, passion, proud, sacrifice, spirit, tears, tragedy, triumph. While these 33 words are by no means an unabridged collection of schmaltzy nouns, adjectives, and verbs, they’re a good sampling of NBC’s bathos. Think of them as the Dow Jones of sap.