Anyhow, Google and YouTube have taken the Parisian Love ad and turned it into an interactive tool called the Search Stories Video Creator. Now you can create your own search story and even choose your own music. It’s pretty cool and it takes all of five minutes to spin your own 30 second digital yarn. Below is my contribution, inspired by our beloved office mascot, Hollywood.

Go ahead, watch the video above. Funny spot, right? It aired in the Super Bowl and a little over 100 million people thought it was funny, too. After all, who doesn’t love the E*Trade baby?

One person who didn’t think it was funny and who doesn’t love the E*Trade baby is Lindsay Lohan, whose lawyers announced that the “actress” is suing E*Trade for $100 million because of the two-second appearance of the “milkaholic” baby named Lindsay. Lohan’s lawyer’s claim that she’s got “single name recognition” like Oprah or Madonna. The makers of the ad claim they chose the name because it was popular and someone on the creative team also had the name.

I can think of a lot of single names Lindsay Lohan is synonymous with, but “Lindsay” isn’t one of them.

In other Super Bowl advertising legal news, Punxsutawney Phil — the famous shadow-seeking groundhog known for pissing off millions of people every year with his predictions of six more weeks of cold, snowy weather — is suing TruTV for its portrayal of him as a “long-haired hippy, bearing a striking resemblance to Pittsburgh Steelers All Pro strong safety, Troy Polamalu.” I actually think Phil has a shot at winning this one. That thing they pulled out of the hole does look an awful lot like Troy Polamalu.

Taken as a whole, the most sickening spots in the world have to be Skittles commercials – which is ironic considering the candy tastes pretty good.

These spots are devoid of human love and kindness, which is not what you’d expect from a candy. “Taste the rainbow” indeed.

Take the Sheep Boys spot with two guys’ heads on sheep bodies eating Skittles off a tree stump. What the heck is this trying to say? That someday, we’re going to raise human-animal hybrids and feed them candy? What would we have them for? Their wool – or their meat too?

One commercial has a sad guy with a Midas-like touch, but instead of gold, everything he touches turns to Skittles. This is the tamest spot I’ve seen of this campaign, since the young man and woman with him seem a little sympathetic at the end.

Most of the ads are creepy, but the latest one is way over the top. In it, a teen in ragged clothes has a tree that grows Skittles coming out of his abdomen. “Mom, do you think after the Skittles harvest, we can call the specialist?” he asks, mentioning his dream of going to college. However, his mother is only concerned with his candy production. “I thought we were done with all that silly dreamer talk,” she tells him.

Annual sales of Skittles are about $150.2 million, according to Business Week, making it among the top 25 selling candies in the U.S. Skittles has nearly 3.8 million fans on its Facebook page and has some wacky videos posted there as well.

I don’t know why the ads bother me so much. Maybe because I can’t get the damn sheep boys out of my head every time I eat Skittles. I don’t want anyone coming after me with shears… or a meat cleaver.

The Super Bowl is the biggest day of the year for two things: football and advertising. That’s why Pavone created SpotBowl.com, which I’d like to invite everyone to visit if you’re looking for a worthy distraction before, during or after the big game (kickoff is Sunday at 6:28 p.m.).

Many of you are probably already familiar with our annual ode to the ads. Now in its seventh year, SpotBowl is an advertising poll that lets America sound off about what they really thought of the game’s ads. Last year, as it has in many of the past years, SpotBowl registered more than 100,000 votes from fans in all 50 states and several countries around the world.

At its core, SpotBowl is a public survey – polls open as soon as the game starts and remain open until Monday at 3 p.m. – but it’s grown into much more than that. For instance, this year, Pavone has optimized the site to allow mobile voting for the first time ever (I’m pretty sure it’s the first ad poll of any kind to do so). That means Super Bowl viewers can watch the ads and register their votes from their iPhones, Blackberrys and other web-browsing devices from wherever they may be on Super Bowl Sunday.

We’ve also upped the pre-game draw by adding a section of the site that helps fans plan the ultimate commercial-watching party, complete with recipes provided by some of the best food and beverage brands in the nation.

So I invite you to check it out and let me know what you think. I also invite you to vote as often as you’d like. And don’t be afraid to be blunt in your assessment of the ads that fumbled. For $2.8 million per 30-second airing, they deserve nothing but our brutally honest opinions.

May the best ad win! (And it might just be the one below.)

While societal “norms” influence us to judge our peers based on the outside, advertisers are stepping in to capitalize on the appearance appeal.  It’s not a new strategy, of course, but it seems that marketers are cashing in on our waistlines now than ever before. Weight-loss advertising isn’t “losing” much of anything these days and in fact it has grown into a billion dollar industry.  More than $34 billion was spent on over-the-counter weight-loss supplements in the past decade. On average, 6 out of every 10 Americans are overweight and an estimated 68 million American adults are “trying” to lose weight. To put the facts in perspective, that’s about 10 million less than the estimated 78 million Boomers currently living in America.

A recent study confirms 15 percent of weight loss ads reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission, contained false information. So how does the weight-loss industry turn such a high profit on ads based on lies?

Since obese Americans nearly outnumber Boomers, I can understand how the large (and getting larger) target audience can be profitable, but what I can’t comprehend is why we believe the deception? The scary amounts of money pumped into this competitive industry only make me wonder, what other forms of deceptive advertising I have been victimized by?  Is effective marketing more valuable than honest marketing in today’s society? It certainly seems that way.

This makes me think of a case study I saw presented at an Adweek Creative conference a couple years ago. BMW wanted to target 46-year-olds, with a median income of $150,000. They knew two-thirds were male, married, and had no children. But they also discovered that 85 percent of BMW purchasers used the Internet before purchasing.

BMW Films was born by combining the ideas of producing a series of short films and using the Internet. They assembled a cast of A-list directors and actors, and developed scripts based on having a central character helped through difficult circumstances using driving skills—in a BMW. The car became the star. Each director was given complete creative control.

The effort was supported with movie trailer style TV spots, print and online advertising. The campaign was solely designed to drive consumers to the BMW Films website. After a required registration, viewers could stream the films or download a BMW Film Player that included vivid descriptions of the vehicles.

In the first year more than 10 million films were viewed from BMWFilms.com. Nearly 2 million people registered on the site, with 60 percent of those registrants opting to receive more information via e-mail. An amazing 94 percent of registrants recommended films to others, seeding the viral campaign, and more than 40,000 people responded to a survey. They even spun off a contest by having visitors enter to win the M5 used in “The Star.”

The really interesting part of this story is that BMW Films was first conceived in 2000. Sometimes to understand the future you have to look at the past. What can we learn from this almost 10-year-old campaign?

• Know your target through research
• Give creative freedom because ideas are king
• Success comes from media integration

It reminds me of my German car. People are talking about the latest hybrid and electric cars while my 1999 Jetta averages 47 mpg on diesel technology that’s been around for decades.

CBS owns the rights to the big game this year and is charging $2.5 to $3 million per ad and they’ve already sold 70 percent of their inventory. By comparison, NBC had sold 80 percent by October of last year. Hyundai, Careerbuilder, InBev Anheuser Busch, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Bridgestone, Frito Lay/Doritos, and GoDaddy.com are reportedly all returning to the line-up.

And with that, here’s the best Super Bowl commercial of all time… if your criteria is goose bumps.

For instance, the other day, or maybe it was today, there was a full-page ad in the local newspaper for hearing aids. It was a massive blur of type in a mishmash of fonts and – get this – the only ART besides the itty bitty little cover of “2009 Consumer’s Guide to HEARING AIDS” in the lower left hand corner was gray balloons and streamers in the background! Why? Because MAY IS BETTER HEARING MONTH of course! If this company has a marketing agency, they should be fired.

In the same section, there’s another full page ad for hearing aids but it’s much nicer looking and it uses Helvetica. (That font rules the world. There’s even a movie about it.)

There’s a funny rant site about some awful ads in the LA Times that may have been done by an in-house marketing department. The one with the full-page mug shot is hilarious. The company implies it has lots of money but these ads are bargain-basement quality.

Microsoft has plenty of money to throw around but throws it in all directions at a bunch of agencies and hopes something sticks. Stylistically, their ads are all over the map. The worst were the ones with the weird butterfly people.

Share your most hilarious, awful print ads with us. Or let them know that your favorite marketing agency is here to help them.