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Spotted by our sister blog, Galley Cat, the show Mad Men is further dipping its toe into reality, as well as cashing in thanks to a helpful subplot, with the upcoming release of the book Sterling’s Gold: Wit and Wisdom of an Ad Man, a fictional memoir penned by the show’s fictional character, Roger Sterling. Galley reports that the book is to be 176-pages, priced at $16.95, and, to prove it’s an honest to goodness book, wrapped in a cloth cover. Will it sell? To that certain subset of rabid Man Men devotees, surely. But wherever there are aunts, uncles, parents who remember that one time you mentioned liking that show, or last minute gifts for people who work in anything close to the advertising business, it will sell like Sterling himself had put together the campaign for it. The only thing that really gets us about any of this silliness is the truly horrible cover. We’ll be cool with it if that wrap around the bottom turns out to be a removable insert used to move units, but if not, our eyes are going to scream every time we have to see this at the bookstore this holiday season.

Our pals/owners at mediabistro have just launched a new service that might be of interest to those in the ad game (or who recently binged on a DVR’s worth of Man Men episodes and are too lazy to build a time machine, but still want to work in the field). In collaboration with the Miami Ad School, they’ve launched Creative Pro, a monthly subscription offering with video tutorials, portfolio critiques, and live webcasts (their first is free, next week, entitled “Building Your Own Creative Industry,” hosted by the two fellas from Lucky Viral Branded Content). If you’re already in the business and looking to move up or out, or you’re trying to break in, it’s apt to be a worthwhile step, with experts set to come in from places like Strawberry Frog, Ogilvy, and McCann Erickson, among lots more. So there’s our sales pitch. If you want to learn how to say all of that in just a tag line or a thirty second commercial, we’ve provided you with a source. You’re welcome.

This week in Switzerland, Le Corbusier isn’t being celebrated by his native countrymen as much as he likely would have wanted. Shortly after the Swiss bank UBS began a new advertising campaign featuring the legendary architect, the AP reports that they were reminded that relatively new information has come out over the past few years that he also might have had a penchant for being a Nazi sympathizer, something that didn’t sit well with this bank in particular given certain dark spots in its history. Thus, the campaign was immediately shut down and likely stuffed in a vault somewhere, never to be seen again. Following the UBS incident, city officials in Zurich, who were planning to dedicate a town square in his honor are now planning to take “another look at the historical record.” So despite having squares and roads named after him already in other parts of the country and his face on each and every 10-franc bill, this could be the first move in Switzerland distancing itself completely from Le Corbusier’s name.

If this distinctively staggered group of attractive individuals appears a bit more colorful (and color-coordinated) than the typical Annie Leibovitz-snapped celebrity scrum, it’s because the subjects aren’t famous actors or directors, and this only looks like a Vanity Fair cover try. It’s actually an ad from Benjamin Moore’s new campaign, which touts the venerable paint company’s high standing in the design community. “According to a recent survey, nearly 80% of the design community recommends Benjamin Moore over any other paint,” notes the ad, referencing a finding from a company survey of “3,000 design and painting professionals.” The statistic hovers below Mark Seliger‘s photograph of Moore fans including interior designers Celerie Kemble, Jamie Drake, and Amy Lau and architect Vladimir Topouzanov (a nod to the Canadian market). All are participants in the company’s “Experts Exchange,” a Facebook initiative aimed at uniting design pros and consumers. Developed by Cramer-Krasselt/New York, the $15 million campaign is betting big on new media. “We’re creating a Facebook on steroids program,” said Benjamin Moore marketing manager Nick Harris in a press release. If all goes according to plan, the campaign “will stir consumer fans to meet up with paint and style experts and aficionados for an online cocktail party of conversation about decorating with paint and color.”

Are design and advertising mortal enemies? Strange bedfellows? Distant cousins? Estranged cousins who occasionally share a bed? Find out tonight at Parsons when AIGA/NY convenes a panel to discuss this increasingly complex relationship. A trio of versatile experts will be hand: Art Directors Club president and rogue adman Doug Jaeger, Mother/Mother Design founder Michael Ian Kaye, and Todd Waterbury, executive creative director at Wieden+Kennedy New York. Vivian Rosenthal, co-Founder of Tronic Studios, will moderate what is sure to be a spirited chat. Learn more here.

An ad for the new season of Bravo’s Top Chef Masters and the Chip Kidd-designed cover of A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs. (Photos: UnBeige and Macmillan)

Although we probably won’t be able to stomach Bravo’s newest reality show, Work of Art, we’ll never lose our taste for Top Chef. Wednesday saw the debut of the second season of the show’s popular “Masters” version, in which celebrity “chef-testants” endure challenges involving gas station grub, wacky themes, and evil twists (surprise! you’ll be serving this meal underwater!). Bravo knows its core audience and tends to bombard major cities with advertising when a season premiere is nigh. In New York City, buses and outdoor ads for Top Chef Masters featured a clever design concept that whetted our appetite for the show and seemed somehow familiar. Our brain immediately summoned the anthropomorphic fork dreamed up by Chip Kidd for the cover of A Wolf at the Table, Augusten Burroughs‘ 2008 memoir of his terrifying father. In other Kidd news, the designer (clad in fetching embroidered trousers, no less) made the front page of Sunday’s New York Times when the paper’s Motoko Rich reported that Kidd has teamed up with Preppy Handbook editor and co-author Lisa Birnbach on a preppy sequel due this September.

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.