When the going gets tough.... Tom Farber, a teacher at a suburban San Diego school, has sold out his ad inventory for the year. That's pretty good in this economy. When Farber's school district "announced the district was cutting spending on supplies by nearly a third, [he] had a problem. At 3 cents a page, his tests would cost more than $500 a year. His copying budget: $316," found USA Today. "But he wanted to......

A TV commercial, shown above, appearing statewide this week has ignited a debate on whether it is a political ad or not. Political ads must disclose donor names. The makers, Let California Ring, say it's not, but Prop 8 proponents say "it is a campaign ad," according to the LA Times. The ad, which backs gay marriage, never mentions Proposition 8, the current ballot initiative that proposes to eliminate gay marriage in California. Lawyers......

For the past few months we've noticed our friends randomly appearing in sidebar ads on Facebook and thought, "ZOMG Zuckerberg, are we all being used so you can pick up all of our friends for your third-party app-monkeys? At left, you see Tom Lewis aka TV Junkie purporting to endorse a Facebook App. Sure, he probably is a Facebook "fan" of the app but we doubt he realizes that his image is being used in......

It looks very smooth in real life, doesn't transfer to video well If you weren't sleeping on the northbound Metro Red Line between Hollywood/Highland and Universal last week, then you may have noticed a Speed Racer movie trailer all of the sudden playing inside the tunnel. Officially announced today, the high-tech subway tunnel advertising tool is a first in North America for this type of digital advertising. It is "an LED system composed of......

How 'bout the end of that Super Bowl? Good thing Eli Manning came through because the ads really weren't all that, save for the near death of Richard Simmons (with Alice Cooper behind the wheel). But at $2.7 million per 30 seconds, who are we to not expect more? Gotta dig that nutty unibrow: I CAN haz Doreetoh!!!11!:......

LATimes.com is well aware of the conflicts that come with contextual advertising -- no ad box appears alongside search results for terms such as "porn" or "sex," for example. But, for now at least, "freaky big, cartoon like muscles" are only a click away....

There I was, minding my own on the Red Line, screeching along toward Hollywood and Western, reading the ad copy on the walls. I'd seen the cross-promotional Metro-Wicked ads before, but I noticed something different this time: the witch is reading a copy of the Los Angeles Tribune. (Hed: "Metro Named America's Best Transportation Agency.") Two questions: First, why isn't she reading the Times? It's probably because Metro's marketing department wanted badly to include......