Amazingly stupid adverts or how creativity went too far...

Microsoft announced it was moving away from its commercials featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld just two weeks after unveiling the baffling teaser ads. Although the Seinfeld spots were so short-lived that they might be dubbed a failure—particularly since Seinfeld’s deal with Microsoft is rumored to be worth $10 million—Microsoft and ad agency Crispin Porter claimed that the teasers did what they set out to do.

The tale of Gates and Seinfeld traipsing around with the common man wasn’t the first ad campaign to struggle to find its audience. If Microsoft execs need a boost, they can console themselves that it could have been worse. They could have run one of these campaigns:

1. Virgin Blue Encourages Travelers to “Chuck a Sickie”

Earlier this year, budget Australian airline Virgin Blue ran a campaign telling potential passengers to “chuck a sickie” to take advantage of the carrier’s ultra-thrifty fares. If you’re unfamiliar with Australian slang like I was, you might think this campaign was some sort of horrifying effort to encourage the tossing of ill people. Instead, “chuck a sickie” is a more benign term for taking a sick day from work. Virgin Blue head Brett Godfrey didn’t see the campaign as harmless fun, though; he didn’t appreciate how they supported workplace absenteeism. Godfrey reportedly ordered the ads pulled just 29 minutes after seeing them for the first time.

2. Chevy Lets Users Generate Attack Ads

In 2006 Chevrolet ran a promotion tied to an episode of The Apprentice. The idea was that fans of the Chevy Tahoe could go on Chevy’s website and “build their own” Tahoe ads from stock footage of the SUV rumbling through the wilderness. Chevy’s website would host the ads, and the best ones would win concert and sporting event tickets for their directors.

However, the site drew more than a few directors seeking a soapbox from which to lambaste SUVs, often with hilarious results. The natural settings in the stock footage coupled with the directors’ own trenchant barbs about environmental degradation fostered some truly biting attack ads that ran on Chevrolet’s own servers. Here’s an example:

3. Benetton Goes to Death Row

Italian clothing maker Benetton has never backed down from a controversial ad campaign; at various points the company has run pictures of terminal AIDS patients and a priest kissing a nun. However, many critics thought the designer finally crossed the line in 2000 with the campaign “We, On Death Row,” which featured death-row inmates wearing their prison uniforms. The company’s catalog contained pictures of 25 death-row prisoners, and their faces also appeared in print ads and on billboards around the world.

The campaign’s creator, Benetton creative director Oliviero Toscani claimed that the images were simply used to draw attention to the brutality of the death penalty. Families of the prisoners’ victims and victims’-rights groups contended the photos and accompanying narrative glorified the convicts and portrayed the killers as the actual victims. (The ads didn’t mention the often-grisly crimes for which the subjects were imprisoned.) Public outrage grew so quickly that Sears terminated its contract to peddle Benetton’s clothes, and the campaign could still be considered to be one of advertising’s bigger blunders in poor taste.

4. Nike Dunks Its Sneaker Shots

Nike’s Hyperdunk basketball shoes got a huge shot in the arm earlier this year when the viral video of Kobe Bryant wearing the sneakers and jumping over an Aston Martin became a web sensation. The print ads Wieden + Kennedy designed to go along with the shoes didn’t fare quite so well. The ads presented large photographs of a basketball player being dunked on; the center of each shot was the hapless defender’s face, which was obscured by the flying dunker’s thighs and waist. Slogans like “That ain’t right” appeared on top of the image. To basketball players, it seems apparent that the “that” in question is being on the receiving end of a ferocious dunk. Others, though, thought that the key to the image was one man’s groin in another’s face, and “That ain’t right” was actually a homophobic slam. Following a heated debate on Wieden + Kennedy’s blog and a loud public outcry, Nike scrapped the ads.

5. Just For Feet Trips at the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl is the biggest stage for advertising, and as such, it can be the scene for some of the industry’s biggest failures. Few ads in history have failed quite so spectacularly as the one footwear chain Just for Feet ran during the 1999 Super Bowl. The spot portrayed a Humvee of white mercenaries chasing an African runner before giving him a cup of drugged water and then forcing a pair of Nikes on his feet while he’s passed out. The ad weathered criticism for being colonialist, racist, and pro-drugging; the whole thing was offensive enough that no one seemed to even notice it didn’t even really make sense.

Want more proof that the ad was transcendentally bad? Just For Feet sued its ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, for $10 million for convincing the company to run the ad despite its misgivings. Although Just for Feet eventually dropped the lawsuit, the company filed for bankruptcy protection later that year amid a serious accounting fraud.

The Eater of Time...

It's gold, features six patented inventions … and has fangs.

The hour approaches. The beast's jaws gape, its tail quivers and then snap! Another minute has been devoured, and the hour strikes with the ominous clonk of a chain dropping into a coffin. The creature blinks twice in satisfaction.

"It is terrifying, it is meant to be," said John Taylor, the creator and funder of an extraordinary new clock to be unveiled tomorrow by Stephen Hawking at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. "Basically I view time as not on your side. He'll eat up every minute of your life, and as soon as one has gone he's salivating for the next. It's not a bad thing to remind students of. I never felt like this until I woke up on my 70th birthday, and was stricken at the thought of how much I still wanted to do, and how little time remained."

Christopher de Hamel, an expert on medieval manuscripts and Fellow Librarian at Corpus Christi, described the clock as "hypnotically beautiful - and deeply disturbing".

Hawking, celebrated as the author of A Brief History of Time, is returning from the launch of the particle accelerator at Cern in Switzerland to unveil Taylor's sinister vision of his subject.

Taylor is an inventor whose thermostat switch is incorporated in 600m electric kettles all over the world. He first gave £2.5m for a new undergraduate library at his old college, and then offered to create and donate the £1m Corpus clock to the library. The work has involved 200 people, including engineers, sculptors, scientists, jewellers and calligraphers. Taylor regularly flew over in his own plane from his home on the Isle of Man to keep an eye as beady as his creature's on the work.

For all its apparent eccentricity, the clock is based on solidly traditional clockwork - unusual in these days of digital electronic clocks. It has taken seven years' research and construction, incorporates six patented inventions, and is predicted to run for at least 250 years assuming the world lasts that long.

Engineer Stewart Huxley refuses to reveal the secret of its tricks, which include the pendulum occasionally apparently catching and stopping for a heartbeat, and then swinging faster to catch up.

The rippling gold-plated dial was made by exploding a thin sheet of stainless steel onto a mould underwater: none of the team actually saw it happen because the only place in the world which could make it was a secret military research institute in Holland.

The monster momentarily stops the turning dial with its foot to mark the minutes, shown as blue LED lights shining through slots. It was originally conceived by Taylor as a literal interpretation of the grasshopper escapement invented by his hero, the Georgian clockmaker John Harrison whose fabulously accurate mechanisms solved the problem of establishing longitude at sea.

The creature, modelled by sculptor Matthew Sanderson, was inspired by medieval armour and gradually became more ominous: part-lizard, part-stag beetle, a Chronophage – time eater.

Although the entire mechanism can be swung inside the building for cleaning and maintenance, from next weekend it will be a public clock on a street corner in the old doorway of the former bank, a listed building which became the shell of the library. As the clock was installed over the last few weeks, any time the door in the hoarding was left open crowds gathered, transfixed by the sight of time passing.

The Corpus Clock and Chronophage has been officially unveiled by Stephen Hawking at Corpus Christi College.

Origins of finance giants

The Dow took a nosedive this week. Colbert called it “Watership Dow.” Drudge referred to it as a “Nightmare on Wall Street.” And while I’m not sure whether to smile or grimace at the headlines (I have to commit to one, so I don’t look A.D.D. about being bipolar), the news did give me reason to look up some corporate histories. Here’s some dirt I pulled straight from Wikipedia. And unless this jokester’s been messing with the entries, I’m guessing they’re accurate.

Merrill Lynch

There’s no doubt that Charles Merrill was a genius. Not only did the Amherst and Michigan Law alum foresee the Great Depression (he divested many of his holdings before the crash), he also begged Calvin Coolidge- a fellow Amherst alum- to speak out against the stock market speculation. The Merrill Lynch group, which went through numerous name and line-up changes (Charles E. Merrill & Co., Merrill, Lynch & Co., Merrill Lynch, E. A. Pierce, and Cassatt, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane) made some of their first big money by investing in what would become RKO Pictures (in 1921), and in purchasing a controlling share of Safeway grocery stores in 1926.

Goldman Sachs

A week ago, I would have thought Goldman Sachs was the gold standard in investment banking, but apparently, that hasn’t always been the case. In fact, they got into quite a bit of trouble in the late 1920’s. Founded in 1869 by Marcus Goldman, a Jewish immigrant from Germany, the company started off in the paper business. When Goldman’s son-in-law joined the company it added the Sachs to the banner, and the company made it’s first big money when it got into the Initial Public Offering game. They managed the Sears, Roebuck and Company IPO in 1906, the biggest to date. Apparently, things were humming for a while. They hired a ton of MBA’s (giving more credence to the degree). Unfortunately, they severely marred their reputation when they offered a “closed end fund” to investors. It ended up working much like a Ponzi scheme, and the whole thing came to a head in the big stock market crash of ‘29. According to Wikipedia, it took years to fix the damage to the brand. In fact, it wasn’t until 1956, when they managed the Ford Motor Company’s IPO that they earned their reputation back.

AIG

Who knew that AIG started out in Shanghai? The company was the brainchild of Cornelius Vander Starr, a clever American who became the first Westerner to offer insurance to the Chinese. Wikipedia lists him as the son of a Dutch railroad engineer who started an ice cream business at 19, moved to California and sold car insurance while studying for the bar the next year, then took a job as a clerk for the Pacific Mail Steamship company where he (maybe) sorted mail and (definitely) found himself in Japan. In any case, he started AIG in 1919, sold insurance to other foreign markets once he’d established himself in Asia, and moved the company to New York City after the Communist Party took over in 1949.

Lehman Brothers

Perhaps the strangest of the origins to me was that of Lehman Brothers. I’d always just assumed that the (formerly) prestigious firm was a New York institution, and had been started by Yankee elites in the last 60 or 70 years. Apparently, the story begins in Montgomery, Alabama! The 20-something Henry Lehman moved to southern state straight from Bavaria, and set up a dry-goods store. Slowly, Lehman’s two brothers moved to the states, and joined him, and together they started realizing the value of cotton. They even began to accept cotton as payment in their store. When Henry passed away from Yellow Fever in 1855, the remaining brothers Lehman moved their operations to New York, where they continued to capitalize on the cotton market, teamed up with Goldman on his Sears IPO deal, and underwrote hundreds of gigantic IPO’s- from Macy’s to Woolworth’s to Studebaker’s to B.F. Goodrich’s. Clearly, it’s been an institution for for quite a while. The company stopped being a family-only firm in 1924, and they survived the Great Depression by making smart venture capital investments.

Although i'm sure these firms achieved greatness because they were good, the question i put before you is were they good enough? and dosen't the U.S government's unprecedented stand of bailing out AIG by putting a bridge loan go against the principals of capitalism and remind one of soviet era state controlled financial institutions and the related problems that cropped up in that part of the world. whatever happened to survival of the fittest? And should the markets in India react so violently to this issue? I share this person's opinion and think these companies folded up due to incompetent mismanagement. I only hope and pray that we learn from these mistakes and recover soon.