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High-flying advertising executive turned author James Othmer's new book, Adland: Searching for Life on a Branded Planet (Doubleday), offers an inside look at the past, present, and future of the ad industry. His tales of the wild and morally questionable ride from the days of Mad Men to branded iPhone apps have proved to be a hit with readers, and AgencySpy editor Mathew van Hoven recently caught up with Othmer for an illuminating chat. In addition to revealing that he parted ways with one of his first literary agents when she quit to enroll in clown school, Othmer offers this tantalizing synopsis of his next book, a novel called Holy Water that will be out in June from Doubleday:

It's about a water-filtration salesman who gets transferred to a third-world nation to open up a back office in a drought-plagued nation. His wife has thrown him out of the house because he lied about his vasectomy. It's one of those books. But he's vice president of Underarms and Sweat at a P&G Colgate-like multinational. It's this kind of droning job. It touches upon globalization, consumerism, 'What are we doing with our lives?'

Every great once in a while, we notice something advertising-y that feels a little weird. Story goes is that lately we'd been noticing the rollout of a new Comcast campaign which you see on nearly every available surface here in Chicago right now. It's a perfectly fine series of ads [not by Goodby Silverstein as we'd originally assumed -- see update below], but what struck us as odd was the design of the new tagline, "It's Kind of a Big Deal." When we first saw it, we thought for sure it was a JetBlue ad, as their agency, J. Walter Thompson, has been using that 3D, forward-flying type effect for years now in all their advertising efforts. Comparing the two side-by-side, they're absurdly similar, from the coloring to the font selection:

So did someone at Comcast or one of their agencies blatantly steal the look? Is Comcast trying to attach themselves to the generally positive reception JetBlue receives for their ads? Or just an accident? These are the questions we have, but will likely never receive answers to. If you have any inside info about the creation of this new campaign, please do drop us a line either in the comments or via email. We'd love to get the skinny.

Update: A rep from Goodby was kind enough to drop us a line to let us know that these new Comcast ads aren't theirs. The guess is that is was a local agency Comcast was operating through for this campaign.

Watch out, YouTube, because wacky wedding videos have nothing on vintage commercials. From Duke University comes AdViews, a growing online archive of television commercials that date from the 1950s to the 1980s. Alongside ads for familiar products such as Crest, Pampers, and an array of breakfast cereals (Honey-Comb's big! Yeah, yeah, yeah!) are those for brands that have been lost to the ages, including Studebaker, Fluffo, and the sinister-sounding Sugarcane 99, the Splenda of its day. The newly digitized archive contains commercials created or collected by the ad agency Benton & Bowles and its successor, D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, and can be viewed and downloaded free of charge via iTunes.

It was the Jean de Florette theme played on a warbling harmonica that sold us on Stella Artois, and the Belgian brewery continues to quench our thirst for memorable marketing. To spread the word about Stella Artois 4%, a new triple-filtered (read: lower alcohol) brew, London ad firm Mother looked to the French Riviera of the 1960s as it was immortalized au cinéma. Translation? Bond. James Bond. A website features a trio of film parodies, complete with faux movie posters, but the real stars of the campaign are the illustrations of Robert McGinnis, who created the original artwork for Bond films including Live And Let Die and The Man With The Golden Gun and came out of retirement to sketch for Stella. Creative Review's blog has McGinnis's preliminary drawings as well as the full line-up of finished posters, which feature a Bond-like character and his slinky female companion enjoying the good life in what appears to be St. Tropez. However, one commenter pointed out that the smooth, piano-playing character in one of the posters bears a striking resemblance to Adam Sandler.

Some fun bits of funny from our sister blog Agency Spy who found this series of very humorous reactions to the Cannes Grand Prix-winning campaign for Wrangler by the agency Fred & Farid and photographer Ryan McGinley. The campaign itself features half-naked attractive people in nighttime, woodsy locations, looking like they were captured by a Nature camera crew, with a small tag running on both the print ads and their commercials, "We Are Animals." It's certainly not the worst pieces of advertising we've ever seen, and some of the photographs are stellar, but we have to agree with the Grand Prix-winning-reaction images Agency Spy posted, which features one heading on Flickr to cover all of the subtly altered photos: "Seriously?" To make things worse, we found this quote by one of the jurors:

David Lubars, the president of the Cannes Lions press jury, said the campaign had won because the idea could work globally to change the US-centric view of the Wrangler brand.

"It is a very emotional campaign, you can see how it can go into all kinds of areas," added Lubars. "The theme is we are animals, a very primal, sexual approach. Before the brand was about middle-aged cowboy jeans from America. Now it takes a whole different look overnight."

Thanks for explaining the theme for us. Otherwise we would have had to read the explanatory tag line and the main thrust of the whole campaign to understand it. Did the jury of this "best of the best in advertising" award also like that the pictures were in color? And maybe we're stepping out of bounds here, but no matter how many slithery, sexy teens you throw at it, how does a company like Wrangler move away from its "middle-aged cowboy" roots while closing their spots and tagging their print ads with a very "middle-aged cowboy" logo?

On our recent trip to the West Coast, the airline (let's call them "United") managed to misplace our luggage—a slightly scuffed Marc Newson for Samsonite wheelie—on the way there and the way back. We spent what seemed like hours staring at the emptying conveyor belt with a growing mix of anger (at the airline) and fear (for our cache of imported periodicals, granola bars, and Tomas Maier beachwear). Next time, we may be able to associate that fear and anger with a procession of advertisements! At least that's the vision of DoubleTake Marketing, the company behind "patent-pending AdSpressive Graphics" (note that "AdSpressive" is trademarked and without the InternaCap sounds vaguely pharmaceutical).

"It is our goal to ensure delivery of your advertising message to a captive audience while they wait for luggage to arrive from the plane," notes the company's website. "The impact of these graphics is undeniable." And that impact, whether positive or negative, is probably coming to an airport near you. According to USA Today, the Kansas City, Seattle-Tacoma, and Omaha airports have already signed on to place ads on their baggage carousels, and 13 other airports—including Atlanta, Boston Logan, and Philadelphia—plan to do so. We're already nostalgic for the days when all there was to do at the baggage claim was stare at the black suitcase repurposed as a cheeky sign warning that many bags look alike.

Having managed to convince everyone from Madonna (who was reportedly paid $10 million) to Mikhail Gorbachev to appear in its ads, Louis Vuitton looked to the heavens for its newest campaign, created by Ogilvy & Mather. In ads that will break in July magazines, former NASA astronauts Sally Ride, the first woman in space; Buzz Aldrin, who took the first steps on the moon; and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell regard the moon from a world-weary pick-up truck. Catching the moonlight just so is a $1,530 monogram canvas Icare satchel propped on the truck's curvy hood. Shot by Annie Leibovitz on a plateau in the California desert, the campaign is intended to commemorate the 40th anniversary of man's conquest of the Moon, according to Vuitton, "elevating the theme of travel as a personal journey to a celebration of a voyage of unsurpassed significance for all mankind." Meanwhile, the campaign marks Vuitton's first steps into integrating print and online marketing with a companion website, louisvuittonjourneys.com, that launches on July 2 with interviews and behind-the-scenes footage from the Leibovitz shoot. Click the image above for a teaser video, complete with spookiness-inducing triple-camera perspective.

Following that last post, here's one of those familiar instances where something labeled "viral" is genuinely not interesting. It also will be filed in our Unintentionally Funny Press Releases folder. So the quick story is that the hotel chain Fairfield Inn & Suites (a Marriott subsidiary) has followed the path of Motel 6 and made Laurent Vernhes groan even louder, by redesigning all of their hotels. The redesign is fine for a big "moderate tier" hotel chain and we're comfortable with that. The problem is that their press release announcing all of this spends most of its time talking about the "new YouTube viral video" they've created. For instance, the company's brand vice president says: "as you can tell from the video, we're shaking things up in the industry" (it gets sporadically worse from there). But really, while it's shot well for an inexpensive production and we truly do appreciate that the promo clip features professional soccer players, it's a video that is not and never will be a) viral (in that it will get viewed many times outside of a limited audience of soccer fans) or b) worth viewing (except for those of us that revel in unintentionally funny things that we can ridicule to make ourselves feel superior to other people) or c) something that has anything to do with introducing the hotel's new redesign. So please, first go read the full press release, followed by a viewing of said video, and then think about where you believe all of this went wrong. Or you could just ignore this entire rant and our bitter, evil cynicism.

Also returning to a story from late February that you may have heard some of the controversy surrounding, that of Doug Jaeger, owner of the firm Happy Corp. and president of the Art Directors Club, getting spotted working with a street artist in defacing/re-working a subway campaign for the MoMA. The hook of the story was that Jaeger's firm was also responsible for creating the whole campaign. Long story short, the MoMA denied that it had any knowledge of these "alterations" were going to be made to images of pieces in their collection, they stopped working with his firm, and now he's up against some legal issues. Returning to all of this, Jeremy Abelson has put together this great piece and video interview with Jaeger about the whole thing. And though everyone is still skirting around admitting to who knew what was going on and whether or not this was just a clever bit of advertising run afoul, it's a great batch of speculation and one of those rare instances where something labeled "viral" is genuinely interesting.

The balloons were the first tip-off. Perhaps you've seen them: globular and arrayed like a macaroon-hued bunch of mutant grapes, they easily lift model Maryna Linchuck high into the Parisian skies. Her confection of a Dior dress (merci, Monsieur Galliano), a pop of hot pink against the horizon, sealed the deal: the ad—for Christian Dior's new Miss Dior Chérie L'eau fragrance—has Sofia Coppola written all over it. And so it should. The print ad is a still from the commercial (below) that Coppola directed for Dior, which describes Coppola's commercial directing debut as "an ebulliently happy short [that] is an ode to Paris and to Monsieur Dior." It's also heavy on imagery familiar from Marie Antoinette, her 2006 retelling of France's iconic but ill-fated queen, though Coppola has traded Versailles for Paris, following Linchuck in staccato cuts through the Place de la Concorde, the Palais Royal gardens, the Latin Quarter, and the Dior Haute Couture salons.

Curious about how all of this Brigitte Bardot-inflected joie de vivre translates to the olfactory realm? "For Dior's in-house perfumer François Demachy, L'eau is above all about the persistent impression of delicious freshness," according to Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, Dior's parent company. "To achieve this feat he amplified the dry woods and gardenia, which bring transparency and lightness, retaining the patchouli and caramel for their suave and generous aspects."