What do you do when your company fails, investors pull out and your industry derides your business model? You wake up, say "fuck it," leverage all the bad press you got and start all over again. Former Firebrand CMO and other former Firebrand employees have banded together to launch FireMedia Partners, a company which will "provide brands with integrated solutions for marketing across today's emerging media." In other words, an ad agency. Like we need another one of those.

Levanthal explains (without forgetting to tout Firebrand apparent "success"), saying, "The knowledge we gained from our Firebrand experience was invaluable, beginning with the streaming video website, the downloadable playlists, the nightly TV show and, of course, the launch marketing campaign. The integrated effort, which combined traditional media with search marketing and social media networking, garnered over 2 million television viewers per week, generated over 250,000 unique visitors, and saw over 100,000 playlist downloads -- all in just 90 days."

CNBC sportswriter Darren Rovell, citing UPS' recent end to its winning streak with Big Brown in the Belmont horse race which was part of a larger event sponsorship, proposes the ad FedEx should run in response. With help from CNBC in-house designer Florence, created an ad with the headline "Big Brown...if you're not first, your last." Witty.

To promote Tom of Finland, a new manly-man scent from Etat Libre d'Orange, Ogilvy/Paris attached naughty images to protruding public fixtures.

Tom of Finland was a gay comic and erotica artist dedicated to preserving his craft. The Ogilvy street images follow his aesthetic.

About the scent: Antoine Lie, who created the fragrance, says the perfume manifests "a guy coming out of a shower. He's clean, but not fragranced. And he puts on leather pants."

Um, okay then. Onto the images (with captions thoughtfully imagineered by me):

o Hard-ons on the promenade
o Dent-resistant elephant tusk
o Length isn't everything
o Warholian meter maids. Got a quarter for the big boys?
o Leaning tower of indefatigable self-esteem
o "...I guess I'm just lucky, Tad. As far as I can tell, I'm the only man capable of hugging my best friend."

The campaign started running in San Francisco at the beginning of June. They also appeared in Paris' Marais, a big gay hot-spot, last weekend.

Thanks to in:fluencia for the tip-off!

Hello & Co. tapped Crush, Toronto to promote its debut. The result was this animated film, where a bunch of little squigglies plop signs marked "Rock Fight" and "HKM" onto the base of a radio tower. Then the signs melt together to form Hello & Co.

Which is pretty much what happened in real life.

Need a production company? See Hello & Co.'s list of directors. (What's going on with the technicolor dream-fonts?)

Oh look. Amsterdam is cool. It's full of perfectly hipsterific people who dress colorfully, ride bikes, play stupid games on lamp poles, ride bikes, dance in the streets, ride bikes, hang out at delis, have big street celebrations, ride bike and, oh, ride bikes.

Oh wait. And they like to drink Amstel Light too because, well, Amsterdam is a Damn Good City for Damn Good Times with Damn Good Beer.

Or, at least, The Richards Group says so.

In yet another example no new ideas exist in the world of advertising, yet another innocent personal human gesture has been usurped and turned into a a marketing ploy. You've seen the marriage proposal billboard before. It's even been written about here on Adrants but, as several of our readers have pointed out our search feature sucks ass, no previous articles could be found.

So why write about another one? Because this time, it's not innocent. Oh wait, maybe the other ones weren't either. We'll never know since we can't find what's been previously written and our memory is for shit, or as a friend recently said "Wait...what? I remember the body shots...but after that...everything gets a little...fuzzy."

"I didn't use my brain. I went straight to the financial aid office." That's the headline from the ad at left, which concludes with a tidy "thinking saves thousands at myrichuncle.com."

Wait a sec. Use your head, stick your hand out? I'm confused.

It turns out the ad is not referring to an exploitable loose-handed relative. My Rich Uncle is actually a national loan company. Visit the site and click on Engage Your Brain, which walks you through the process of applying for student aid.

That's useful and all, but come on. Sally's uncle gave her a trust fund; you're giving me a FAFSA sheet?

- Don't drink in public. Drink at home. This Brazilian beverage delivery company will save you from those unseemly, embarrassing late night moments. Of course, drinking at home, alone, without friends isn't exactly all that better now is it?

- So while Mad Men gives us a quaint, fictionalized look at advertising in the 1960's, the One Club exhibition "The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue and Their Impact on American Culture," at the New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business Library beginning June 24 celebrates, well, the real men and women of advertising.

- David&Goliath redesigns. Uses Pink! (Hey, they wanted to make that point in the press release)

- Ha, ha, ha! Zobzee.com

- Maybe inspired by Apple's limited-edition U2 iPod, Microsoft is releasing a limited-edition Joy Division Zune.

- Expect downtime from Twitter when Steve Jobs takes the floor at WWDC.

- Speaking of Twitter, a lot of fed-up users are defecting to a fancy new site called Plurk. Plurk enables users to follow conversational threads, and encourages use with "karma" points and little gifts. Also, the colors are soothing.

- Facebook has launched an ad feedback feature.

- Filipinos aren't the only people featured in creepy dating ads.

- John McCain: put Obama in office if you want. But hey, if you do, EXPECT APOCALYPSE.

Today is Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. If you don't own a Mac (I don't), don't own an iPhone (I don't) and don't live in San Francisco (I don't), clearly you are a loser of gargantuan proportions (I must be).

Is it a good thing or a bad thing when a brand has so much influence that it makes a person feel unworthy (I do) if they aren't a "club member?"

I've owned a Mac in its previous heydays (No, this is not the first time Apple has been insanely cool), but there was always one annoying thing that prevented me from coming back: some stupid employer edict, a must-have piece of software that wouldn't work on a Mac, an idiotic networking issue, the prevalence of cheap (though decidedly uncool) PCs, or the fact Club Mac simply didn't have the same sway Apple stores now do.

Antwerp residents: if you're wondering why firetrucks are suddenly ubiquitous, slow-moving and sponsored by Tabasco, it's because those aren't firetrucks.

It's just your local buses, dressed like the life-saving vehicles they never grew up to become.

The bus-as-firetruck campaign was put together by Duval Guillaume, which explained -- slowly, so we could understand -- that "Tabasco is so hot that you need a fire truck to cool down your mouth after you've eaten some."

I wonder if that ladder gets hop-ons.

I recently got to sit down with Rhea Scott, Ridley Scott's daughter-in-law. (A breathy PR guy related that trivia to me about four times, which is why I mention it in the VERY. FIRST. SENTENCE.)

Rhea once headed the music video department at Propaganda. 10 years ago she started Little Minx, a production company focused on turning ad directors into filmmakers. From what I gathered in the film reels, directors are encouraged to treat each ad like a miniature manifesto. (It probably also helps to be a surrealist art fan.)

Little Minx is able to provide the necessary creative resources -- read: king-sized budget, the ideal artist's sponsorship -- through parent company RSA.

Rhea says the company was named for her second daughter, "the ultimate little minx" and the child actress in "Come Wander with Me," part of a promotional project called Exquisite Corpse.

Video blogebrity HappySlip has deleted her MySpace profile, including over 34,000 friends, because AdSense repeatedly populated her page with ads soliciting Filipina women.

Women are among the Philippines' most profitable exports. If you plan to do heavy Filipino-oriented blogging, expect to see a few shady sites in surrounding AdSense boxes.

See more ads here. Sponsored messages for girl-peddling sites also appeared prominently during HappySlip's Philippine tourism promotion.

In one of the more interesting methods of attempting to illustrate the waning worth of newspaper advertising, a Gyro-created fake ad campaign for the Philadelphia Inquirer features the fictitious airline Derrie-Air which, in an effort to be carbon neutral (fuckin' buzzwords), promises to plant trees to offset the pounds of carbon its p***s spew into the atmosphere.

Up until the payoff, this could be a commercial for anything. After all, sex sells everything, right? Why couldn't this be an ad for...oh, a house painting company? A car wax brand? A....lawn fertilizer brand?

But a condom brand? So predictable.