Abram Sauer Online

Via the Telegraph, here’s a commercial from the Israeli supermarket chain Mahsaney Kimat Hinam spoofing the (probably) Israeli assassination squad hit in Dubai. Can you say, Clio!?

Dane101 is reporting that Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison’s legendary Babcock Hall dairy operation will be creating a special “Google Fiber” flavored ice cream to attract Google’s Fiber Project to Madison.

The final version should be out in three or four weeks. Drop by!

Yes. Yes that is an ad on Gawker for Old Navy clothing.

Queen Latifah’s new romantic comedy Just Wright gets its Mac product placement just right.

See the whole matrix at Brandchannel

Earlier I looked at how Audi is using heavy product placement of its R8 sports-car model to lift the brand’s overall image and how those placement were ramping up in 2010 with The Joneses and Date Night. Add one more; with the new Iron Man 2 trailer, it looks like Audi has Tony Stark in the brand’s driver’s seat once again.

Student newspaper The Badger Herald recently made the very stupid decision to run a Holocaust-denying ad on its website. The editor’s defense? “As much as I hate what I think Bradley Smith [the man who bought the ad] was trying to say in that ad, and as much as I hate what the Holocaust deniers are saying, they do have a right to say it.”

Um… I see a fine future for this Jason Smathers fellow; In the current climate who doesn’t want an EIC who will take any amount of ad money for any crazy thing?

Following last year’s “East Coast Jewish Honeys” rap, the University of Wisconsin-Madison student body is quickly redefining the campus from a hotbed of crunchy hippie liberal idealism to one of cultural intolerance and antisemitism. That’s not going to help property values.

Full Disclosure: I wrote various (terrible) articles for The Herald’s competition “The Cardinal” years ago just before the Cardinal, the “commie” student paper, went bust after a century.

Russ Darrow, an auto-dealer in Wisconsin, is giving away a free iPad with every Mazda purchase. The commercial in its entirety.

Three is a trend, right?

While the health-care debate rages crawls on, one thing seems to be clear: Everyone from “The people” to politicians are in agreement that doctors are a problem. Either they are too greedy or they are too clueless and out of touch with real patient needs or they are incompetent, slowlky killing us all one mistake at a time. So it’s a great time to make shows focused on the real heroes of health-care, nurses.

And to make the nurses look more heroic and competent, doctors are being played off as arrogant, dismissive imbeciles whose lack of knowledge about medicine is killing people left and right. (One line, in response to a patient who asks what the nurses are good for, from the nurses on the show Mercy: “We protect you from the doctors.”

Trailers for the upcoming nurse-centric NBC show Mercy, Edie Falco’s project Nurse Jackie and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Hawthorne all, to some degree (Mercy is the absolute worst), play off the audience’s already-held beliefs about doctors being absolute shits. Part of this doctors-as-the-problem comes from the recent docs-in-pop-culture shows like Grey’s Anatomy, which, working on a CSI-level of misinformation about a profession, lead audiences to see doctors as self-absorbed jerks more concerned with their lack of orgasms than their patients’ mortality.

Gone are the days of ER, when nurses were capable and so were the doctors.

Sick people, and even healthy people, generally fear doctors because they (the doctors) have all the power in the relationship. Meanwhile, nurses seem more “like you and me.” Kind of like how George Bush was, you know, not one of those wonky eggheads; he was a guy’s guy. Nurses, likewise, are the ones you’d like to have a beer with.

Stupid doctors.