As Jeffrey Trachtenberg and Brian Steinberg report in today's WSJ, Michael Crichton and HarperCollins are using YouTube to promote his new novel, Next, with fake commercials for a biotech company called NEXTgencode, which features prominently in the novel. The ads are also viewable on the "company website." One of them has puppies!

Cute, right? But if you go watch the ad, it's actually kinda creepy. To say more would spoil the surprise!