Sponsors this year for the CBGB Music and Film Festival in Times Square will be Coca-Cola, Spotify, Red Bull, MTV, Gibson Guitar, The Standard Hotel, Astral Tequila, J&R Music and Bust Magazine.

The free outdoor concert is expected to see Broadway in New York City closed to car traffic from 46th Street up to 54th Street between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Oct. 12.

About 30 bands are expected to play at the event and will be announced in coming weeks.

"Times Square is the crossroads of the world," said festival organizer Tim Hayes. "It's the most visited spot on earth ... We think it's the biggest stage in the world."

Overall, the 2013 CBGB Festival will feature more than 500 artists playing at 125 venues in Brooklyn and Manhattan between Oct. 9 and Oct. 13. The schedule also features more than 125 panel speakers from the music and film industries, and 100 screenings of music-related films and documentaries. 

CBGB, the movie, will also make its U.S. festival premier at the 2013 CBGB Festival. The historical drama's cast includes Alan Rickman as CBGB founder Hilly Kristal and Malin Ackerman as Debbie Harry, the lead singer of rock band Blondie. The movie is already airing on DirecTV's video-on-demand platform.

This year is CBGB Fest's second. In 2012, the lineup featured 300 artists and 125 speakers, but no film component and a smaller, four-block footprint for its Times Square concert, which featured bands like Duff McKagan's Loaded, Superchunk and The Hold Steady.

The festival is the main reincarnation of the classic NYC punk rock club. Opened in 1973, the venue was a breeding ground for bands like the Ramones, Talking Heads and more. The club closed its doors on the Bowery in 2006, and Kristal, who planned to re-open in Las Vegas, died from cancer in 2007.

Investors bought the CBGB name from Kristal's estate in 2008, but in 2010 filed for bankruptcy. The Las Vegas location never materialized. After a handful of lawsuits, the CBGB name (along with artifacts from the club's original location) ended up in the hands of Kristal's daughter, who in 2011 sold it to another group of buyers, including festival organizer Hayes, with ties to the club's history. 

In early 2012, rumors began swirling that they would also open a new brick-and-mortar location in Manhattan, hopes the brand's owners confirmed later that year. A new CBGB has yet to appear, though.

The delay is the result of a highly competitive Manhattan real estate market, said Hayes, one of the new co-owners. He and his partners have placed offers on two buildings on the Lower East Side but the deals did not come through—and they're still looking. 

"We're committed to doing CB's in New York," said Hayes. "We'd love to do it other places if it meant that we could support live music and inspire musicians and inspire freedom of expression and do all the things that CBGB's represented."

Like Kristal, they explored expanding to Las Vegas, said Hayes, but the opportunities weren't right. "We're here to grow it, but we're not here to sell out," he added. "That's a difficult balance but we're being patient."

Today in semi-obscure but fantastic source material for ads: A-ha's famous video for "Take on Me" has inspired the fun new Volkswagen spot below by Deutsch LA.

The VW spot, directed by David Shane, whose résumé includes Bud Light's "Swear Jar," is a combination of stills, animated sequences and live action, just like the original video. And like the original, it was rotoscoped—meaning they filmed the actors and the cars and then animated the results.

The automaker must have figured enough of the target market was soaking up MTV in the mid-1980s to make this worthwhile. The original video, directed by Steve Barron, made the song famous rather than the other way around—the track was released three times before finally hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1985, a year after it was recorded. The video won six prizes at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards but was beaten out for Video of the Year by another Barron production—the video for "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits.

The end of the VW spot is amusing, and true to life: As Rolling Stone has noted,"Take on Me" does indeed have "one of the hardest-to-sing choruses in pop history."

CREDITS
Client: Volkswagen of America
Interim Chief Marketing Officer: Wayne Brannon
Vice President, Marketing: Kevin Mayer
General Manager, Marketing Communications: Justin Osborne
Advertising Manager: Jeff Sayen
Advertising Specialist: Chanel Arola

Spot: "Feeling Carefree"

Agency: Deutsch, Los Angeles
Executive Creative Director: Michael Kadin
Group Creative Director: Matt Ian
Creative Director: Mark Peters
Associate Creative Director: Ryan Scott
Director of Integrated Production: Vic Palumbo
Director of Content Production: Victoria Guenier
Executive Integrated Producer: Jim Haight

Production Company: O Positive
Director: David Shane
Executive Producer: Marc Grill
Line Producer: Ken Licata

Editorial Company: Union Editorial
Editor: Jim Haygood
Assistant Editor: Dylan Firshein
Executive Producer: Michael Raimondi
Producer: Joe Ross

Post Facility: Company 3
Colorist: Beau Leon

Animation, Visual Effects Company: Passion Pictures
Head of Production: Anna Lord
Executive Producer: Alex Webster
Producer: Matt Saxton
Director: John Roberston

Music/Composer: "Take On Me"
Performed by a-ha
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Records Inc. & Sony/ATV Music Publishing
By arrangement with Warner Music Group Commercial Licensing & Sony/ATV Commercial Music Group

Audio Post: Lime
Mixer: Mark Meyuhas
Assistant: Matt Miller
Producer: Jessica Locke

Additional Deutsch Credits:
Chief Executive Officer: Mike Sheldon
Account Management Credits:
Group Account Director: Tom Else
Account Director: Monica Jungbeck
Account Supervisor: Alex Gross
Account Executive: Tara Poosti
Assistant Account Executive: Mary Cherwien
Product Specialist: Eddie Chae
Account Planners:
Chief Strategic Officer: Jeffrey Blish
Group Planning Director: Susie Lyons
Legal/Broadcast:
Director of Integrated Business Affairs: Abilino Guillermo
Group Director, Integrated Business Affairs: Gabriela Farias
Director or Broadcast Traffic: Carie Bonillo
Broadcast Traffic Manager: Courtney Tylka

Last week, Chipotle launched "The Scarecrow," a short animation about a dystopian future ruled by overly processed food. The film's soundtrack features Fiona Apple singing "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It's already approaching 6 million views on YouTube, and per viral video tracker Unruly Media, more than 300,000 shares on Facebook and Twitter. That makes it creative agency CAA Marketing's second branded entertainment hit for the burrito marketer, following 2011's similarly formatted "Back to the Start" video, which featured Willie Nelson singing Coldplay's "The Scientist." Adweek caught up with CAA Marketing co-chief creative officer Jesse Coulter and creative director Todd Hunter to chat about the thinking behind "The Scarecrow," the process of developing the new video over the past two years, and what might be coming next from the brand's "Cultivate a Better World" marketing campaign. 

What's Chipotle's main goal here?
Todd Hunter: The big swing with Chipotle is always trying to change people's perceptions of fast food. Chipotle fundamentally believes that if more people knew more about the efforts they go to to source their ingredients and their food, and to being transparent about where it comes from, that in the long run people really appreciate that and understand it. 

How does this differ from traditional celebrity endorsement deals?
Jesse Coulter: It's not an endorsement deal. Fiona really liked the film, and she likes the song and she really believed in it.
TH: Fiona is a longtime activist in animal welfare. She has a beautiful voice. She's a very talented artist. So there were some natural interests that aligned with the artist and the message. So that was a big part of it.

Why else did you pick her?
JC: She has the right voice for this song, because there is a melancholy haunting quality to it. There’s a vulnerability to her voice too, and the scarecrow has a vulnerability. This could go to the wrong place where it becomes super saccharin, if done incorrectly. 

Why is it important to use big-name talent for a project like this?
TH: People are in general drawn to authentic storytelling from talented artists. For Chipotle, which has to fight above its media weight in comparison to some of its very large competitors—lets say the traditional fast food chains—certainly having the right talent associated with it helps us draw awareness to the story we're trying to tell.

Why Pure Imagination?
JC: One thing we love about the track is, in the beginning of the song, of the film, the scarecrow is kind of living in someone else’s world that's been created. It's their imagination, kind of ironic and dark. By the end of it, the same lyrics actually are now sincere. It's more the scarecrow's imagination. That was really powerful for us. The same lyrics had a different meaning from beginning to end.

What other songs did you consider?
JC: We looked at hundreds and hundreds of songs. Once we heard Pure Imagination, one of those songs we hadn't thought about till Duotone brought it to our attention—we hired them to be our music supervisor, as we did last [time], for Back to the Start—once they found that track it's like oh, my god, this is hiding in plain sight.

Why use Moonbot Studios to help develop the story?
TH: When The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore came out both on the animation scene—but also as its app—I was really drawn to it immediately. [Later,] they won the Academy Award [for Fantastic Flying Books]—right about that time we were ready to understand who was the right partner to bring to life the world that we had been creating with Chipotle, and it seemed like these stars were aligning.

Can we expect to see more videos from Chipotle using this formula (famous artist + famous song + dark animated story)?
JC: I think we probably will tell another story. It's going to be one of those things where we’re going to develop it, and see if it's making sense, and we're liking it ... it'll come out when it's ready to come out. There's never a media buy. There's never a specific timeline. We don't really have formal briefs. We talk a lot about creating pure experiences, and there are no compromises.

Andrew Loog Oldham, the manager and producer of the Rolling Stones from 1963 until 1967, still considers his work in branding the world's greatest rock band—he essentially built their image from the ground up—to be all but unsurpassed.

"No one's reinvented the wheel. We're still it," Oldham told Rob Schwartz, the global creative president of TBWA, at the beginning of a conversation at Advertising Week on Wednesday. "You've got the side issue of hip-hop and rap. But in terms of what's left of white people, we're still it."

Oldham, 69, went on to describe how his efforts to get the band noticed in the early days were revolutionary—disruptive, as advertising people would say today.

Oldham did PR work in the early '60s for Bob Dylan and the Beatles. But the Rolling Stones were his blank canvas, and he turned them into legends. Oldham started out in the fashion industry, and he used that experience relentlessly as he crafted the band's image—moving them first from the kind of matching outfits that the Beatles favored to their own, less uniform way of dressing.

"The Beatles looked like they were in show business, and that was the important thing," he said. "And the important thing for the Rolling Stones was to look as if they were not."

Oldham's influence was everywhere. He tightly and efficiently managed almost every aspect of the band's image, which was largely manufactured but made to look simply like the effortless style of five young men.

"I told them who they were, and they became it," Oldham said of the Stones.

Originally, though, it wasn't five young men—it was six. But Oldham thought that was too many for the public to obsess over, so he demoted keyboardist Ian Stewart to studio-only work. Not coincidentally, Stewart wasn't as slim as the other five band members, and didn't fit in the picture that Oldham was drawing. In essence, he was art directing the band.

Oldham played up the Stones' bad-boy image. When a British journalist asked, in a story, "Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?" Oldham publicized the quote far and wide. "Within a week it had become a slogan," he said.

He had the band add "(I Can't Get No)" to the title of the song that was originally called simply "Satisfaction," to more explicitly broadcast its darker theme. He also added a seemingly random comma to the song title on the single for "Paint It Black"—making it "Paint It, Black." That was a sly publicity move, too.

"I think this is a throwback to my admiration for Saul Bass," said Oldham. "I just put a comma in there because I knew I would get calls from the record company saying, 'Are you sure about this? There's a comma there.' And that would make them notice us. If they're releasing 10 or 12 or 20 records a week, it would make them notice us."

Oldham also helped to art direct the band's album covers, beginning with their very first, self-titled record. Oddly, the band's name didn't appear on the front of the record—which was all part of Oldham's plan to build a mystique around them.

"I got away without having their name on it," he said. "And that really was quite a feat. I told the record company, 'You're not getting the record until you agree.' "

Along with his clear vision for the band and his shrewd use of pop culture to promote them, Oldham shared a few other branding tips—chief among them, finding an enemy to work against (for the Stones, it wasn't the Beatles but instead acts like Elvis and Cliff Richard) and moving quickly with any sort of image making—i.e., less overthinking and more overdoing.

"You have to jump into the pool before you know whether there's water in it," he said.

Finally, Oldham said consumer brands can be a lot like rock bands in the sense that, at their best, they're aspirational and linked to your identity.

"The great artists represent you. The great products represent you," he said. "They don't tell you who you are. But with them, you require less verbiage."

For Pepsi's pop music marketing, keeping up is essential.

"Our mission is to move at the speed of culture," said Bozoma Saint John, Pepsi's head of music and entertainment marketing, during Advertising Week's "The Sellout" panel Tuesday. "If we move too slowly we've missed the moment, and therefore our brand is no longer relevant." 

Pepsi has used pop stars in ads for decades, working in the past with artists like Michael Jackson, and Beyonce headlining the brand's current efforts. But across the marketing industry, deals between brands and artists have become increasingly common in recent years, as collapsing record sales have forced the music business to find new sources of revenue, and as brands have sought new ways to reach consumers who are tuning out traditional forms of advertising like television spots, in favor of digital media.

"We have to find ways to create content that folks want to see," said Saint John. "That can't be done in a sort of one-time-only type of scenario. We have to find a way to make the story bigger." In other words, the marketing efforts of the music industry and other businesses like Pepsi have become more closely intertwined than simply licensing songs for advertisements. "If you have the labels pushing the music, [and the brand] pushing the music, everyone can win in the end—that's the best case," said Saint John.

Perhaps counter intuitively, more speed doesn't necessarily mean more data. "We're trying to figure out how to use less data actually, if that makes any sense," said Saint John. "Because our business is driven by data. It's a data business. It's analytics. We need to know what volume is looking like. What's happening daily on data. We rely so much on that, so when it comes to things that are culture, I'm trying to actually help unlearn some of that behavior.

"So when people ask me things like 'Oh what's the score on such and such artist,'" continued Saint John, "I'm just like 'I don't know, and we're not going to find out.' It becomes a very different conversation about maybe what their influence is on social, without looking at the numbers, or how they are affecting culture or in the case of Mountain Dew, how we are changing culture in a specific genre."

Nonetheless, Pepsi has done substantial work over the years with web music service Pandora, a company that is busy emphasizing the value of using data to help better connect marketers and artists and audiences to one another.

"What we offer to brands is that we can target the audience that they want to hit," explained Tommy Page, vp of artist partnership and events at Pandora. "We can figure out exactly what the brand is going for, who that person is and then find the artists that are trending with the same description and demographic, and then geo target them via our data. Our data is our secret sauce."

Of course, the broader increase in music-brand deals doesn't mean that they're always easy to navigate. "Every brand has their horror stories about working with an artist," said Gabe McDonough, vp music director at Leo Burnett. "And it's getting to the point  now where people are going into things very much with their guard up."

That's left him routinely managing expectations ahead of time, he said, telling clients "Rare is the deal where there's not some crazy-ass curveball thrown in. So just know when that happens know that the sky isn't falling. That's just all part of getting there."

Breaking Bad fans have fallen over themselves today lauding the show's producers for choosing the beautiful musical send-off—"Baby Blue" by Badfinger—for the drama's final episode Sunday night. And the immortalization of the 41-year-old rock tune meant a boon to its digital sales, charting as high as No. 27 on iTunes (per blog Showbiz 411) earlier today and sitting at No. 30 on Amazon's music channel at press time.

The reaction by Breaking Bad watchers and music fans is reminiscent of when Journey saw a huge lift in sales for its "Don't Stop Believin'" song after it closed the last episode of The Sopranos in 2007.

The thinking behind "Baby Blue" by Vince Gilligan & Co. is obvious—lead character Walter White's story arc revolved around manufacturing the purest, blue-tinged crystal meth found anywhere. The opening lyric: "I guess I got what I deserved."

But the Breaking Bad-Badfinger context could be interpreted as even more darkly apropos. Each entity's storyline is pocked with tragedy.

The British rock band never realized its full potential, struggling for nearly a decade after songwriter Pete Ham hanged himself three years after "Baby Blue" hit the Billboard Top 20. Bandmate Tom Evans committed suicide, too, in 1983, effectively ending Badfinger.

Sports Illustrated is testing a paywall that lets readers access its print articles early if they watch a 30-second video ad first.

The provider is Selectable Media, which has been testing consumers’ willingness to watch video ads for free WiFi, music and games. This is its first public test with a major consumer magazine.

With ad dollars under pressure, publishers are looking to consumers to generate revenue, but with so much news and information freely available, paywalls have had mixed success (The Dallas Morning News and San Francisco Chronicle recently dropped theirs). Time Inc. has tried to protect its subscription business by making its print content only available to subscribers when posted online. Like all publishers, it’s also wrestling with how to extract more value from its readers and advertisers. To that end, People is trying tiered offers to retain existing customers and lure new ones.

But the advent of tablets and the hope that they would create a new base of paying customers notwithstanding, some readers may never become paying subscribers. The premise of Selectable is that they may pay with their time, though; it’s not unlike tactics attempted by Salon and others a decade ago and more recently by Genesis Media.

“At the end of the day, every publisher is looking to boost their subscription base,” Selectable Media CEO Matt Minoff said. “More and more people are expecting content to be free. Publishers are coming to grips with that new reality and looking for new ways to monetize that content and create premium content that can still be profitable.”

The SI experiment is modest for now; it has applied only on the desktop and to a range of SI stories, which typically are only immediately available to paying subscribers (magazine content becomes available for free online after the print issue goes off sale). Akin to the Hulu and YouTube ad swap model, viewers are offered a choice of ads to watch (Del Monte vegetables and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. were two recent options), the assumption being that if people get a choice of which ad to watch, they’re more likely to recall it and buy the product. Once the visitor watches the ad, the article is unlocked for a 24-hour period.

Selectable claims that in general 50 percent to 70 percent of visitors will view videos that are implemented this way and that SI’s results fell into that range. (SI declined to discuss the test or the results, other than to say, “This is an era of great experimentation with content and technology and what Selectable offers is intriguing.”) The platform, whose evp, chief revenue officer Tom Morrissy is a Time Inc. vet., is in talks with other brands at the publisher.

For Fox Broadcasting, which has been testing the unit for its new show Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the unit was a way to reach sports fans 18-49 while seeing whether viewers are more engaged with ads they choose versus forced preroll, said Emily King, svp of media and on-air planning for Fox Broadcasting. “Hopefully it means they’re more open to our message,” she said.

As we've mentioned before, Activision and Interscope brought together two of its juggernaut franchises—Call of Duty and Eminem—for a cross-marketing push promoting the game's new Ghosts title and the rapper's upcoming album MMLP2 (short for Marshall Mathers LP 2). Today, the music video rolled out for Eminem's song "Survival," which is on the Call of Duty: Ghosts soundtrack. The video, which is a collaboration with Activision agency 72andSunny, is basically a four-and-a-half minute commercial for the game, with footage from it sprinkled throughout. (Ant Farm supplied the gameplay footage for the spot.) Eminem worked with Activision in 2009 on Modern Warfare 2 and in 2010 on Black Ops. For much more on the partnership, check out Sam Thielman's earlier story, linked above. For the video, see below (warning: explicit lyrics).

Patrice Wilson, the guy who gave us Rebecca Black's "Friday" video, is back to his trolling ways with another ludicrously awful production starring a teen singer—Alison Gold's video for "Chinese Food." In it, Gold sings about—well, about how much she just loves Chinese food. "I love Chinese food/You know that it's true/I love fried rice, I love noodles/I love chow mein, chow m-m-m-mein," she sings idiotically. (Wilson, who appeared in the "Friday" video, shows up here as a rapping panda bear.) The aggressive stupidity of the lyrics matches that of "Friday," and the video is on the same general trajectory—almost a million YouTube views in 24 hours, and almost a 4-to-1 ratio of dislikes to likes. Chinese-food chain Panda Express gets a mention, but hasn't officially responded to the video yet. Judging by their own weird ads (see below), they'll probably like it.

Jack In The Box has launched a Facebook app that lets viewers search for tunes and click through to Spotify—if they are signed up with the digital music service—to get a listen.

In the process, users can create "Jack's Late Night Munchie Mix" playlists and share them with friends within the social-music feature. The move marks a trend from recent months where brands are increasingly interested in attaching music-listening experiences to digital marketing.

The San Diego-based fast-food chain wasn't available to comment, but it's using one feature from a suite of new products from startup F# (pronounced "ef sharp"). Absolut just ended a test run using the Facebook music app that pushed a sweepstakes. Per F# reps, 32 percent who used the app entered the liquor brand's contest, and 36 percent created playlists.

Moving forward, another debuting F# product, called AdPlayer, entails musical display ads for publishing networks. Viewers click to play the tunes within a music player on major sites, theoretically. Think Pepsi potentially leveraging its relationship with Beyoncé via ESPN.com or NYT.com ads. It sounds cool, but the New York-based F# wouldn't disclose brands interested in the product.

Though AdPlayer's capabilities has the ear of pundit Alice Enders, Enders Analysis. "[It] solves a real problem of online marketing by allowing advertisers to mesh their brand with the music loved by the target of the ad, generating far superior yields and effectiveness," Enders said.

The AdPlayer function is just the latest in a string of music-minded marketing products. Just last week, nutritional supplement maker Mead Johnson started testing tunes in email campaigns from a service by DMI Music. 

At the same time, it's unclear if viewers—whether at work, at home or on the go—will be willing to stop what they are digitally doing to listen to songs simply because a brand is pitching the idea. Yet with utility-centric branding plays like Nike's Fuelband being so wildly popular, expect more experimentation in the services-as-marketing space.

Word-of-mouth marketing may be the hot new trend, but when it comes to getting people to recommend a brand, nothing gets people talking up a brand like live experiences do, a new study shows. Momentum Worldwide surveyed more than 6,500 people in nine markets globally to compare the impact of 23 types of brand experiences, including watching TV commercials, visiting a brand’s social networking page and attending a branded music, sports or other event. Among the takeaways: Attending a branded live experience drives 65 percent of people to recommend the brand and 59 percent to buy it at retail afterwards.   

Illustration: Carlos Monteiro

Specs
Who Partners, from left: Sacha Jenkins, svp of culture and entertainment; Peter Bittenbender, co-founder and CEO; Alma Geddy-Romero, vp of development; Misha Louy, executive producer; and Jason Goldwatch, co-founder, director, photographer
What Production company
Where New York

An ad shop more or less by accident, Decon started as a production company, became a record label, and now defines itself a “creative studio” specializing in content. Each of Decon’s five partners adds a distinct flavor to the mix, from music and TV production to journalism and marketing, and that diversity is its stock-in-trade, attracting clients including Google (via Anomaly), Absolut, NBCUniversal and Nike. To wit: Decon is creating spots for Google Glass using that technology, recently reunited legendary rap group A Tribe Called Quest for a tour, and owns the rights to the song “A Beautiful Mine,” aka the Mad Men theme.

UPDATE 2: The Beastie Boys released this statement Monday:

    Like many of the millions of people who have seen your toy commercial "GoldieBlox, Rube Goldberg & the Beastie Boys," we were very impressed by the creativity and the message behind your ad.
    We strongly support empowering young girls, breaking down gender stereotypes and igniting a passion for technology and engineering.
    As creative as it is, make no mistake, your video is an advertisement that is designed to sell a product, and long ago, we made a conscious decision not to permit our music and/or name to be used in product ads.
    When we tried to simply ask how and why our song "Girls" had been used in your ad without our permission, YOU sued US.

UPDATE: A rep for the Beastie Boys tells the Huffington Post that the band has not made any claim against GoldieBlox, saying: "There was no complaint filed, no demand letter (no demand, for that matter) when [GoldieBlox] sued Beastie Boys."

Original item below:
The feel-good ad of the month has taken a feel-bad turn. The Beastie Boys apparently have a problem with GoldieBlox's version of their song "Girls" in the overnight smash-hit "Princess Machine" commercial, which recast the track with new lyrics as an empowerment anthem for little girls. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the band has allegedly threatened legal action, claiming copyright infringement, and the toy company has preemptively filed its own lawsuit asking that its version of the song be considered fair use—a common defense in cases involving parody material. The sticking point for GoldieBlox may be that "Princess Machine" is expressly designed to sell toys, and thus is a commercial endeavor at least as much as it is a sociological statement, but it will be up to a court to decide. The Beastie Boys, meanwhile, risk looking like they're censoring a worthwhile message that has enthralled millions—though of course it's hard to protect your intellectual property if you're willing to look the other way now and then based on ideology or pressure from the public. You can read GoldieBlox's full complaint here.

Century 21 and its agency, Mullen, have been doing some offbeat stuff together lately—pretending to sell Walter White's house on Craigslist; urging Twitter's mascot to upgrade to a bigger birdhouse after the company's IPO. But this new video is truly out there—a Thanksgiving ode to the soporific effects of turkey meat called "Tryptophan Slow Jam." It's available on iTunes, and Century 21 will donate all proceeds from the sales to its philanthropic partner, Easter Seals. It doesn't seem to have much to do with real estate—nor does the #Tryptophan hashtag, which Century 21 is also pushing this week. But hey, amusing content doesn't always have to double as a sales pitch. (Right?)

GoldieBlox went from hero to zero in one short week, putting our ad-loving hearts through a roller coaster of emotions. Now, it's belatedly making amends by removing its parody of the Beastie Boys' "Girls" from its mega-popular "Princess Machine" ad—and posting its own "open letter" to the band (and the world) telling its side of the story.

To recap: GoldieBlox last week released an empowering spot using a rewritten version "Girls" as the soundtrack to breaking gender roles in the toy space. (Sample lyrics: "It's time to change/We deserve to see a range/'Cause all our toys look just the same/And we would like to use our brains.") The ad was clever and cool, and everyone loved it—except they failed to ask the Beastie Boys for permission to use the song. The band objected, and GoldieBlox sued to have its soundtrack declared fair use. That precipitated a PR nightmare (especially after the Beasties posted a frankly damning open letter in response). So now, GoldieBlox has surrendered—deleting the video, posting a new one with a more generic soundtrack and releasing its own lengthy statement about the affair.

"We don't want to fight with you. We love you and we are actually huge fans," GoldieBlox founder Debra Sterling writes. She goes on to defend her intentions but says "our hearts sank last week when your lawyers called us with threats." Sterling says she had no idea the late Adam Yauch was opposed to using his music in ads (not every "huge fan" of Yauch's knows this, apparently, even one who is looking into doing just that), and adds: "We don't want to spend our time fighting legal battles. We want to inspire the next generation. We want to be good role models. And we want to be your friends."

It's basically a passive-aggressive non-apology, casting the Beastie Boys as bullies and GoldieBlox as the victim—and also, irritatingly, the bigger person. The company suddenly doesn't want to fight a legal battle, even though it started one. And it wants to be friends, even though it's spent a week trying to be enemies.

Perhaps this bitterness is understandable. The company had a huge hit on its hands—deleting it must be tough to swallow. And the new spot (posted below), without the Beastie Boys song, definitely has less energy—although maybe it just seems that way because most of us are sort of over it.

How do you get people around the world talking about a Dutch subscription service for disposable cat litter? Why, you create a music video featuring glamorous costumed kitties parodying the Pussycat Dolls, of course.

The Poopy Cat Dolls and their song, "If You Want My Purr Purr," are worth checking out, even if you don't live in the Netherlands, don't need to order monthly deliveries of biodegradable cat litter containers and don't actually remember what the Pussycat Dolls sounded like.

Despite its limited geographical footprint so far, the video has already gotten the attention of Laughing Squid,Huffington Post and Mashable, so don't be too surprised if Poopy Cat ends up scratching its way to American doorsteps sometime soon. 

The fair-use fight between Beastie Boys and GoldieBlox isn't over.

After sparring several weeks ago over the unauthorized use of the Beasties song "Girls" in a GoldieBlox commercial that went viral, the toy company deleted the video and uploaded a new version with a different track (see below). But that did not satisfy the band, which has now countersued, demanding that GoldieBlox hand over profits it earned from using the song without permission, reports Gigaom. The Beasties also seek damages, lawyers' fees and an injunction preventing GoldieBlox from using the song in the future.

The suit claims GoldieBlox is liable for copyright and trademark infringement and sets the stage for a judge to decide whether or not the company's parody of "Girls," with different lyrics, constituted fair use—as GoldieBlox contended in its earlier, preemptive suit against the band. Also interesting: The band says it first heard about the GoldieBlox ad when an ad agency that was submitting the spot to Intuit's "Small Business Big Game" Super Bowl contest (in which GoldieBlox is a finalist) inquired with Universal Music Publishing Group about whether GoldieBlox had secured the rights. (They would have heard about it eventually, of course.)

So, it seems likely that we'll get a decision on the fair use question after all.

Well, this is just all sorts of amazing. Taking the time-lapsed Photoshopping of Dove's "Evolution" to a new level, Hungarian singer Boggie has created a music video in which she is digitally retouched from normal girl into glamorous pop star.

Through a combination of CGI trickery and seamless editing, the video for "Nouveau Parfum" is so compelling, it's hard to look away. And because the on-screen effects are so subtle, you're still able to pay attention to the song, which isn't bad at all. The video was posted to YouTube in December but only recently became a viral sensation, generating almost all of its 2 million views over the past week.

The 27-year-old singer, whose full name is Csemer Boglarka, told the Daily Star that the shoot took eight hours and required five changes of wardrobe, makeup and hair style. She was proud to see the effort paying off by continuing to fuel the global debate over manufactured beauty.

"Women open magazines and they have to face that on the pages everyone looks perfect, therefore they start to feel imperfect. I wanted to make it clear that we shouldn't try to compete with this perfectionism and manipulation which ruins your self-esteem," she told the newspaper.

"You should accept yourself on your good days and bad days, which is a hard process but it pays out at the end."

Via The Presurfer.

Lorde is a humble, homegrown New Zealand star, and she's taken out a full-page ad in the New Zealand Herald to make sure everyone back home knows she hasn't forgotten that.

Ahead of her performance at the Laneway music festival on Wednesday night this week (apparently her only summer show in New Zealand, where it's summer, Yankee suckers), the singer of anti-materialist anthem "Royals" penned a handwritten note for the ad celebrating her performance Sunday night at the Grammy Awards in L.A., not to mention the two awards she picked up there, for Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance.

"hiya if you're reading this, Joel & I won. HOLY CRAP," reads the letter, referring to her producer Joel Little. "I just wanted to say thank you for the time you've given me over the past 14 months… without your support there's no way I would've ever gotten to stand in the middle of the Staples Center and perform in my school shoes."

It's a classy, charming statement of appreciation that fits nicely with her acceptance speeches, and broader down-to-earth positioning—a nice example of when marketing can perfectly align with honesty. Or at least, with an exceptionally convincing illusion of it.

See the full ad below.

I never thought I'd hear Tegan and Sara in an Oreo commercial, but I also never thought Tegan and Sara would make bouncy dance pop, so everything's up in the air at this point.

The Canadian duo provided a pretty awesome version of the "Wonderfilled" jingle for this "Dare to Wonder" ad from The Martin Agency (it first aired during the Grammys) promoting a series of limited-release Oreo flavors including berry, peanut butter, lemon and mint. Honestly, all those sound really gross, but the jingle is right in line with Tegan and Sara's lyrical sensibilities, and of course they didn't even write them—the ad agency did.

Living in a world where Tegan and Sara play a song they didn't write for the purpose of selling junk food feels a bit strange, but they've said they don't make albums to keep their old fans, so perhaps that same principle has been applied here.