People loathe, loathe, loathe being sold things. Much like the canvassers parading up and down the block with clipboards, it's easy to avoid most hard sells if you keep your eyes to the ground and your finger on the TiVo button. Banished to the realm of petty annoyance, advertisers have had to adapt to the increasing chatter that consumers use to drown them out, and the result haven't always been pretty. Your shows get "paused" by snipes. Your reading material gets absorbed by advertisers. And now, you're basically reading advertising copy in your leisure time.

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Are you a poor coward who likes to get drunk? If so, you probably shouldn't be buying alcohol, but that's certainly not going to stop booze company admen from directly targeting your demographic with their fine, destructive product. Allow us to introduce the wine tube, a grownup version of those fun-ass Mind Eraser vials they sell in Cancun. A two-ounce container of merlot (chardonnay, whatever), the wine tube is made specifically for the consumer who doesn't know their claret from their beaujolais and is too broke to buy a bottle on spec. WineSide, the machine behind the wine tubes, says they don't want customers to feel "daunted" when buying wine, and they'll be selling the wands individually or by box. Remember when boxes of tubes of wine used to be called bottles?

In related "Crappy Bottled Things" news, water baron Evian is set to release a product called "Brumisateur sprays," which one sprays on their face and body when one "just can’t get out of bed." Use them after too many tubes of wine. Or when you're a stupid person!

If Christmas ads are the drinks, then lackluster Christmas sales are the hang-over and we’re giving up booze.

Every year, our reward for making it through a month of ubiquitous Christmas ads is hearing about how ineffective they were. This year was no exception:

Spending from Thanksgiving to Christmas rose just 3.6 percent over last year, the weakest performance in at least four years, according to MasterCard Advisors, a division of the credit card company.

If it’s any consolation, Amazon had its best Christmas ever. Actually, it’s not. We don’t care either way.

Considering that magazines are dying and cigarettes can kill, you’d think the two would be a perfect match. Turns out, with all the future smokers underage readers and restrictions, print is dead to Big Tobacco.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, maker of Camel and American Spirit, announced that it wouldn’t run any ads in consumer magazines in 2008. Philip Morris has not run a print ad in the past three years. Reynold’s decision is unofficially the result of a flap over a recent Camel insert in Rolling Stone’s November 15 issue.

So now that cigarettes won’t be advertised in magazines, maybe they’ll garner an indie appeal, making high school kids look extra cool smoking. After all, as Lydia Hearst reminded us, "this whole country was founded on [looking cool]."

Between Gossip Girl and Project Runway , you may have forgotten about last night’s YouTube Republican debates, where "You" were the star. The show had its high points, but drew some criticism for continuing to go on even while "You" were busy contemplating whether mismatched couple Serena and Dan (and a dozen or so wanna-be designers) could "make it work."

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Looks like there is some logic to Rupert Morduch's eyeballs over dollars plan. Ads for newspapers’ websites increased by 21.1% last quarter, making it the 14th consecutive quarter with double-digit-ad growth online. Overall news profits are down 7.4%, as print and classified advertising continued to fall. One thing we’re thankful for this year is being in a business that’s supported entirely by online ad revenue. [AdAge]

When flipping through the New Yorker for cartoons, the ad above always gave us pause. Mikhail Gorbachev, aka birthmark head, was the last leader of the USSR. A Louis Vuitton bag is like the least communist object ever. Mikhail Gorbachev and Louis Vuitton are both too serious for irony, so what’s the deal?

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GLEE.com, a social networking site for “gays, lesbians and everyone else” is a great place to advertise jobs. But recruiting for the military? Not so much.

Despite the lack of “qualified” candidates who use GLEE.com, the Army had been advertising on the site as part of its $6.5 million Internet campaign this year. When USA Today asked the army about ads, Maj. Michael Baptista, advertising branch chief for the Army National Guard, said, “This is the first I've heard about it.”

Just a heads up to Baptista: by “everyone else,” GLEE.com is probably not referring to ex-high school football stars with nothing going on since graduating five years ago.

[Queerty]

Don’t worry fat kid, NBC has your back.

The station is expanding its ban on ads for fattening foods during kids shows. Starting June 1, 2008, there will be no more Chester the Cheetah or Tony the Tiger during its Qubo block of children’s programming on local NBC and Telemundo stations. Ibra Morales, president of Telemundo Stations Group, explains.

Our recognition that obesity is a serious threat to Hispanic children's present and long-term health has been at the forefront of our community efforts for some time.

Of course, the serious, long-term health concerns of alcohol consumption have not affected NBC’s policy regarding beer ads during football games.

[AdAge]

SonyBMG has made Bob Dylan's video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues" the next Monk-e-Mail.

To promote “Dylan: His Greatest Songs” the company created a Web site and a Facebook platform that allows users to add personalized text in place of the lyrics from the original video.

Quick question: How many greatest hits does Dylan have?

It's great to know the lyrics about the 60s counterculture will be soon be replaced with “It was so good to see you at the Frat party last night. I got so trashed. Let’s meet up at the library soon. ;)”

Philadelphia Media Holdings is in talks to drape the Philadelphia Inquirer-Daily News building with ads for Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld's new animated feature.

Philadelphia residents and journalist question the ethics behind such a plan. PMH CEO Brian Tierney insists that the newspaper isn’t interested in the plan for the money. He described the bee fee as "very little, minuscule, pennies."

So why would he want a 50-foot inflatable bee dangle off of his building?

"If we can do this, it'll be all over the local media and people will be talking about it" he said.

Except people are saying, “Draping your building in advertisements is somewhat ethically troubling, and to do it for a nominal fee is just plain stupid.”

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It's the dead of winter. You've got two weeks worth of vacation days to use up before the end of the year. You know what it's time for? A Bahamavention. It's like a real intervention, except this one whisks you off to the island paradise to resuscitate your health on fruity umbrella drinks that are delivered poolside. They've got a help hotline, or just visit Bahamavention.com.

Are they done yet? Well, even if these Jane ad do continue, Jossip's next editor may or may not be quite as obsessed with them. Especially if he/she doesn't have a particular affinity for Zoolander, yoga, keg stands, and Kafka. Or Mark Copyranter's particular brand of misogyny. Anyways, in honor of her last day, we are bringing you (possibly) one last Jane advertisement. Sigh.

Click to Enlarge

While we think it would have been much better if she spoke, like, 10 words of 7 languages and said "biyotch" too much, this one is pretty good. We even hear the Jane staffers sit around and think these up themselves.

Which means we're still waiting for the one that says "She Makes $600 a Week. She Spends $350 a Month on Hair Cuts."

And on the 7th date, I finally bent Jane over my Italian leather sofa. [Copyranter]

Gwyneth Paltrow declaring her African heritage was not enough for One, the celeb-heavy org devoted to ending poverty, hunger, and AIDS in the great "nation" of Africa. They now want celebs to pose in their t-shirts, looking like they're smack in the middle of a mad acid trip.

We agree with our snotty little sister — Lindsay Lohan looks like she's hella' cracked out … and what the fuck are Michelle Williams and Heath Ledger doing sharing a t-shirt?

If they were to get two celebs to share a t-shirt you think they would pick Mary-Kate Olsen and Nicole Richie. At least that way it would emphasize the need to help fight starvation on a global level.

One…shirt for the both of us [Mollygood]