Oracle's Wall Street Journal ad (above) said its database ran "faster" on Oracle's own Sun hardware —at "XX transactions per minute" — than competitor IBM's database and server combo. Some of our commenters insisted that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison must have had the "XX" numbers to prove his claim but was, as his ad seemed to imply, sitting on them until an Oct. 14 event.

But Ellison, known for commissioning ads about capabilities that don't yet exist, shouldn't have been given the benefit of the doubt. He's just been fined $10,000 by the benchmarking council Oracle belongs to "because Oracle did not have a [benchmarking] result at the time of publication."

Oracle has not submitted any current evidence to the TPC to sustain this claimed result. Oracle has been directed to cease publication of the advertisement in print or online.

Lesson: Never assume that Larry Frickin' Ellison, of all people, is being coy and modest. Larry Ellison does not do coy or modest. If he has numbers, he will use them. And then some!

[Via All Things D]

Facebook approves every advertisement on its site. But it didn't notice a watermark on one racy ad's picture, identifying it, Forbes says, as one from Jailbaitgallery.com, where the users had guessed the age of the two girls in the photo to be approximately 16 years. Jailbait Gallery apparently specializes in those sorts of votes. Lovely.

The ad promoted alumni networking site MyLife.com, and, according to Forbes' Taylor Buley, "showed two apparently underage blondes in low-cut shirts." MyLife ads on Facebook's current ad board, like the one above, still feature racy female pictures, but presumably of adults: The MyLife executive in charge of affiliate marketers, like the one who took out the offending ad, told Forbes, "a very small fraction of 1% of [our marketing] traffic... would be promoting those kinds of images."

He added, unimpressively, "We've been trying to get our arms around the whole policing aspect." Uh, OK. But surely Facebook is swearing up and down this won't happen again? "A spokesman says copyright owners can fill out an online form and Facebook will take action within 24 hours."

Got that, underaged girls? The best way to keep your pictures from being abused on Facebook is to be sure you're constantly reloading Facebook, according to Facebook.

(Image: A different Facebook ad for MyLife.com, without the "Jailbaitgallery.com" logo and presumably featuring an adult model. Via Facebook.)

Clearly meant to have a lively, "fun" feel, the painful video is so over-the-top bad we thought it first it must be a hoax. But Microsoft's in-house blogger has been touting these events, which are being organized by an apparently well-established marketing company that specializes in getting people to shill products to their friends at sketchy "house parties." Said marketing company owns the YouTube channel where this video appeared.

Microsoft has a track record of tone deaf commercials, but this marketing video somehow hits a new low. Maybe it's the way there's an undercurrent of tension and seething disdain even among the hired professional actors, as in this scene, about three minutes into the video:

Middle-aged white lady: I led an overview of some of my favorite Windows 7 features... It took, like, 10 minutes [approving murmurs]... It was totally, informal, like, everyone just kind of crowded around the computer in the kitchen [hearty laughter].

...After my overview, I went straight to an activity.

Older white lady: Oh, you went straight to the activity? I let everyone fool around with "Snap" [a Windows 7 feature] for a little while! [Uproarious laughter.]

Young black man: Me too! I did the same!

Middle aged white lady: I love Snap!

Older white lady: And then we started an activity maybe 30 minutes later.

Middle-aged white lady: Well, either way works, right? You figure out what your guests want, and play it by ear. In any event, we each did an activity, or two.

Angry party-pooper geek guy (white): Uh I did three activities. Ya.

Middle-aged white lady: Oooooh.

Young black man: Well, excuse me. [Snickering laughter.]

Middle-aged white lady: That's great! [Laughter] The activities each have you talk for a minute or so, and then...

Angry party-pooper geek guy (white): [Frowns, angrily slams down drink, walks over to get more food and stew in silent rage.]

Or maybe it's the way the video undercuts the very product it purports to be touting, by emphasizing the you should actually install Microsoft's operating system at least 48 hours before your... uh, install party. As in this scene:

Angry party-pooper geek guy (white): Of course the first thing you want to do is install Windows 7, right? [Boisterous, awkward laughter.] Now make sure you do that a couple of days in advance of the party. [Laughter silenced.] Call customer service if you have any questions. [Emphatically, this time, waving arms:] Got to play with Windows 7 before the party.

True. Nothing scotches an awesome Windows 7 party like catastrophic data loss, the Blue Screen of Death and impotent cursing. Person-to-person marketing might work for fun products like cosmetics, or cheap inoffensive gear like Tupperware. But operating system installs? Not fun, not trivial, and not the sort of thing that's going to liven up your kitchen. Device drivers? Crashes? Partitioning? Pass the tequila.

[via the Telegraph]

UPDATE: And of course, the parodies have already begun:

The campaign consists of a Web video in which the woman, Karen26, tells a foreign lover — she doesn't remember his name — that she's had his baby and hasn't slept with anyone since he left town. Along the way, Karen26 promotes the national nightlife and tradition of "hygge," i.e. fucking random tourists. The Twittering hordes have, naturally, been all over this.

As AdLand notes, the contrived storyline is not very original, even for guerilla marketing, but the locals are none too happy with the implication that Denmark is filled with "loose women and unprotected sex," and the spot has been pulled. That's a smart move, albeit for the wrong reason: We'd be far less concerned with the honor of Danish women than with the practice of encouraging annoying tourists to be even more annoying by asking endless winking questions about "hygge." No bar would have been safe, Danish ladies.

[via AdRants]

We're guessing that whoever arranged to place an ad for Halloween skeletons next to a picture of Apple's famously a gaunt CEO (click above image to enlarge) is already fired, or perhaps just severely spanked. Still, good luck getting Jobs to return to speak at your next lucrative D conference, Journal guys! (Maybe if you promise him it won't be a bare-bones affair...)

Hat-tip to iPhone Savior, which first posted this. PDF via WSJ.com.

Attached is the ad Oracle ran in the lower right corner of today's Wall Street Journal. An early edition posted to the newspaper's website illustrates how Ellison likes to operate. Check out the highlighted bit — Oracle never bothered to fill in the data to support its certain conclusion. The attitude: "Definitely say we're way 'faster' on hardware from Sun, which we now own, than on IBM, which makes a competing database; we'll find some numbers later to prove it."

All tech moguls, to some extent, play this marketing game, but Ellison has historically been an especially egregious example; his brazenness, in fact, helps explain why Oracle, through a series of mergers, has come to utterly dominate the market for the most complex types of large corporate software.

An example: Ellison in the late 1980s commissioned an ad to tout a hugely complex clustering feature for Oracle database software — and did so before one line of code had been written to support that feature. This according to Mike Wilson's biography of Ellison:

About 1987 word got out that the Ingres database would soon have a sexy new function: It would be able to do distributed queries... Ellison told [Oracle ad man Rick] Bennett to prepare an advertisement announcing Oracle's distributed capability. Then he assigned an engineer to whip up a distribtued feature so the company would actually have something to sell when the ad appeared. Ten days later Bennett's advertisement hit the trade press: "Oracle Announced SQL*Star," it said. "The First Distribtued Relational DBMS..."

"The fact of the matter was Oracle didn't have anything," said George Schussel, the trade show promoter who had followed Oracle from the beginning. "But that was the way they worked. Everything was marketing, everything was image. You simply announced the product and then figured out later how to deal with it from a technological point of view."

Another time, Wilson writes, Oracle took out an ad implying, outlandishly, it had ported a competing database to the PC from mainframes — "IBM SQL/DS AND DB2 DBMS NOW ON PC," read the ad headline. Ellison "exploded" when an engineer challenged the ad, Oracle vet Kirk Bradley told Wilson:

"He said, 'All companies do this. It's standard stuff. You don't know anything about business.'"

It's somehow comforting to know that, while hot companies like Twitter, Google and Netscape may come and go, some longtime CEOs basically haven't changed for decades. Larry Ellison will always be a shameless truth-bender. Just like some of his closest friends.

UPDATE: One commenter supposes, quite plausibly, "They're going to announce the results at OpenWorld on Oct 14 and we're all supposed to tune in then to find out what XX equals." So maybe Oracle is doing the same fill-in-the-blanks thing it's always done, just in a very open and shameless way. Transparency. People do change!

UPDATE 2: Oracle has been fined over this ad, since Oracle did not possess any TPC benchmarks to back up the ads claim. Oracle was, again, hoping the facts would fit the claim, when said facts came into existence, which at the time of this ad they had not.

Now the software company has to explain why it shamelessly pandered to racist customers in the first place. We recommend blaming a Polak. Always messing up, those people are.

Based on the white/black fellow's visible, hand, and the blurred building where the black guy's head was replaced by the white guy's head, we'd say the black guy was Photoshopped out rather than vice versa. But either way, couldn't Microsoft just spring for some fresh clip art, which would at least be less obvious? As Engadget writes, the software company really does suck at Photoshop.

The company's banner ads featured buxom women never seen in the game, a gimmick Evony admitted to launching strictly for "marketing purposes." Videogame marketer Bruce Everiss turned up a pile of evidence of other misdeeds after Evony apparently spammed his blog. Everiss wrote that Evony was built with stolen graphics, content and design; that it was owned by a man, Eric Lam, sued by Microsoft for click fraud and that it is presently gaming Google AdSense.

Evony's attorneys have threatened Everiss with a lawsuit; they've also issued a legal complaint to the U.K. Guardian for asking if Evony had "become the most despised game on the web." Lam, a Chinese businessman, would have more luck with a softer touch and eye toward redemption. There's no reason a business built from roots in seedy industries can't legitimize itself with the right attitude. Just ask MySpace founders — and former spam, porn, and instant-weight-loss moguls — Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson!

Web entrepreneur Jeff Atwood, who first highlighted the ads, writes that they "take advertising on the internet to the absolute rock bottom," and toward the moronic, hypersexualized future foretold in Mike Judge's movie Idiocracy.

Yes, sure, inevitable cultural and intellectual decline of America, whatever. Vulgarians that we are, we're far more burned up by the game's false advertising: After all that flesh, there's not actually a "queen" to "save" in the game! The boobage was strictly for "marketing purposes," according to Evony. Now that's something you can (probably!) sue over.

The first ad emphasized Evony's pedigree as a clone of the strategy game Civilization, in which the player must "build an empire to stand the test of time."

The next picture used a stolen catalog photo to emphasize the game's ample... opportunities for adventure!

But that ad really didn't convey the teamwork aspect of the game. To get across the "cooperation" theme, what could be better than hot twins?? The word "lover," perhaps. There's your ad!

The words "my lord" in prior ads really didn't properly convey a player's dominion over buxom females as well as a kneeling woman with an exposed bra and a sword pointed at her chest. But we'd have gone with, "buy our game or we stab this hot lady" for the tagline, here, as it's really more direct than "Help! Save the Queen," but without distorting the original message.

Oh, forget about saving the queen. So much work! Click here to just have wench sex and rule the world, already.

The orgasmic wench-elf and the kneeling queen and the lusty court twins were all too subtle, it turns out. Click here to play the boob game!* (*Game does not actually involve boobs). (This is an actual ad.) [Coding Horror]

Also, the kid's poor mom is run down by police and hauled off to jail. The video, posted to YouTube, is so over the top we thought it might be a parody, until we saw it touted on the website of its purported author, the Software & Information Industry Association.

SIIA members include old-media firms like Dow Jones, Thomson Reuters and McGraw Hill and software companies like Adobe and Oracle. We couldn't find Microsoft listed as a member, but we're starting to suspect SIIA pirated a page out of the company's hapless advertising playbook.

Highlights above; full video below.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

The ad attempts to sell the new Internet Explorer Web browser on a simple premise: Your husband is probably looking at truly disgusting things on the internet, and this product will help him hide those things, from you.

Another ad in the same series makes even less sense, illustrating how IE helps you alienate your friends with annoying links. And there's this one, which just freaks us out.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

These spots are, at least, marginally more rational than the absurdist, quickly-abandoned Jerry Seinfeld commercials for Vista. They just need a nice tagline. How about, "Internet Explorer: Why Not Drag Out Your Dysfunctional, Creepy Relationship a Bit Longer?" For the eighth iteration of Microsoft's browser, that's kind of perfect!

One furious blogger promised to yank her contributions to the user-review site, adding:

I'm not willing to contribute to padding the wallets of anyone who thinks nothing of pairing innuendo with sexual assault.

Yelp promptly apologized, and tried to recall the newsletter and replace it with a tamer one. But it couldn't keep the fuss from spreading to Twitter and various weblogs (including TechCrunch).

For all the fist-shaking, the ad is basically some silly humor put in a terribly inappropriate — and, we're guessing, unintended — context. If some critics are ascribing the crudest of intentions to the site, well, perhaps that's the price it must pay for throwing such notorious parties.

When Della launched earlier this week to promote the computer manufacturer's line of Inspirion Mini 10 netbooks, the site included a video on shopping for vintage clothing and "Tech Tips" explaining how ladies could use this strange device, as of course, we don't know how to use real laptops.

Joanna Stern summarized on LAPTOP magazine's website:

The Tech Tips page, with its patronizing "Seven Unexpected Ways a Netbook Can Change Your Life," is full of stereotypes of how women's lives can be changed with a mini-notebook... "Track your exercise and food intake at free online sites like Fitday," is Tip Number One, like any self-respecting women's magazine would recommend. Number two: Find recipes online (just because we have laptops doesn't mean we don't still belong in the kitchen). Dell, is this all you think us women do with our laptops? Or do you think women are that slow at the technology uptake that we don't know that a netbook is capable of these activities?

In response to the huge amount of criticism the site received online, yesterday, Dell revised the site, adding the message, "Some of you have read this article over the last several days & will notice a few modifications. You spoke, we listened. Thank you for your ongoing feedback." The "5 Ways to Use a Netbook" section now boasts that the product can help women get organized, read eBooks, track workouts, and is easy to take along when traveling. The page on "featured artist" Robyn Moreno and her video on vintage shopping are still up.

"Some brands go too far with the girlie stuff, and that's when they start getting into trouble," said Andrea Learned, author of Don't Think Pink - What Really Makes Women Buy in the New York Times. Learned said Della emphasizing netbook colors and computer accessories, but burying price information and specifications, seemed condescending to women. "Della's marketing strategy sounds like it's advertising a purse," Ms. Learned said. "There's a level of consumer sophistication they're missing."

"There was certainly no intent to offend anyone and if we did, we apologize," said Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman, according to MSNBC, adding, "Many people do see their laptops and netbooks as a style statement, and we want to be part of those conversations." Style is an important consideration, especially since you'll hopefully be staring at the computer for several years, but it isn't the most important factor in purchasing a computer, nor is it something only women care about. As several of our commenters pointed out earlier, Apple and many PC manufacturers have used style as a selling point to both male and female consumers, but don't assume in their commercials that people don't care about the product's performance as well.

Though Dell revising the more egregiously annoying aspects of the site is a step in the right direction, it still takes a few clicks to find any specifications on Della. The section about Mini 10 Netbooks on Dell's main page seems to include a comparison of the three netbooks' prices, processor speeds, and display sizes. We're not sure what all those crazy numbers mean, but we still don't want a Dell netbook, even if it does come in pink.

Dear Della, Sexism Doesn't Sell Laptops [LAPTOP]
5 Ways To Use A Netbook [Della]
What Do Women Want In A Laptop? [The New York TImes]
Let's Market PCs Like It's 1959 [MSNBC]
Mini Notebooks - Products [Della]

Earlier: Marketing Madness

After a breakup, it's natural to want to email your friends so they can commiserate with you. And according to Google, it's also natural to bombard your fragile soul with opportunistic ads. Like this one:

Get Your Man Back Now - [link redacted] - Avoid Breakup & Learn to Bring Him Close. Get Over Breakup!

Somehow, looking at a website that promises to Get Your Man Back doesn't seem like the best way to Get Over a Breakup.

Or how about this:

Relationship Tips-Advice
5 Relationship Mistake That Destroy Even Remarkble Relationships-Survey

Because rather than getting advice from my friends, who I'm actually emailing, I'd like some tips from someone who can't spell "remarkable."

Perhaps the most heart-wrenching, for the recently broken-up, is this self-esteem torpedo:

Are You Boring?
You Probably Are! Take Our Quiz

But GMail ads, like breakups, can also remind you of the randomness and unpredictability of life. Like this one, found by typing 'breakup' into an email window:

Table Saw Accident?
Have you been hurt in a table saw accident? We can help.

While the others represent the worst side of advertising, exploiting the insecurities of people who are most likely feeling lonely, unloved, and upset, this last one might sort of help breakup victims count their blessings: you might not have a boyfriend anymore, but at least you still have hands.