Taking in another $50.6 million at the box office, Paramount’s Iron Man chugs along with blockbuster status. (We finally saw the movie this weekend. The Sunday evening showtime sold out.) The domestic total now comes in at $177 million, but that’s not an accurate picture of the total revenue the flick is pulling in.

You would’ve been a fool not to notice the rampant corporate sponsorships in the movie, from the Burger King sandwich that Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark just had to have, to the hot Audi cars, like that R8, that all the good guys were driving. (We might be wrong, but all the villains were driving Chevys, or something equally lower profile.) And that scene on the highway, where cars were crashing all over the place as Iron Man faced off against his foe? How convenient, then, to see only an Audi SUV brake just in time to escape crashing (those anti-lock brakes!) and then speed off to safety (0-60 in two movie-seconds!). There’s a microsite, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Nicole Kidman, with child, was dumped this week as the face of Chanel [MC], though she still holds on to the Guinness record for earning the most money per minute, with her 30-second $3.71 million Chanel No. 5 advertisement. Replacing Kidman is someone 11 years her junior: the twenty-nine-year-old Audrey Tautou, who is French, like the fashion house, and an Oscar nominee, to her predecessor’s Oscar winner status. Tatou’s deal is rumored to be worth over $8 million [DM], which is nearly what Kidman’s standard $20 million movie price tag has been reduced to, thanks to The Stepford Wives, The Invasion, and The Interpreter.

The Stoli Hotel, a press-happy pop-up hotel that officially opened last night at 330 West Street at Houston, is also, officially, a clusterfuck.

We’re told last night’s opening, with DJ Juice, which played host to any number of simultaneous events and was graced by the presence of Chace Crawford and Jason Lewis, was “terrible,” a “clusterfuck,” and a “disaster,” according to various attendees. “The crowd was so crazy and lists were fucked up so I left,” says one. “My friend went in and turned around and left. Said it was awful.”

Expect more of the same, since the Stoli Hotel be headquarters for a number of coming events. Among them:

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These two ads are new spots from Absolut Vodka, which are paired with a TV spot labeled “Dissection,” which they hope pushes the message that the brand’s infused flavors, Pear and Mango, are as naturally a part of the flavor as the distilled vodka itself. The ads are part of Absolut’s “In An Absolut World” worldwide campaign, which replaced the “Absolut _____.”

But if you’re a consumer of gay media, the message Absolut is trying to send is a little different.

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As MTV enters the upfronts fray, pitching advertisers on its awesome new slate of reality sludge involving MySpace celebrities and stereotypes of black men, it’s also trying to bait ‘em with a new ad scheme: “podbusting,” a buzz word that translates as “ads that mimic actual TV programming to confuse the viewer into not TiVo-ing through your pitch.”

“We’re looking to redefine the commercial experience,” says John Shea, MTV and VH1’s integrated marketing head. Adds Dario Spina, Shea’s counterpart at Comedy Central and Spike: “We want to blur the lines between the commercial breaks and the entertainment content.”

Brill! How else to keep the kids’ waning attention span but by fooling them into thinking an ad for McDonald’s is actually a Justin Timberlake music video. Oh, wait.

Okay, so this isn’t entirely new, but MTV’s brands do plan on upping the ante by about a million.

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Picking up where Slate left behind in the racy Disney marketing photos – newsworthy thanks to Miley Cyrus! – TMZ.com Googles “Shanghai Zhenxin Garments Co. Ltd.,” the Chinese company behind the ads, and puts together a whole gallery of tweens prancing around in naughty lingerie.

Clarifying speculation that Jennifer Lopez would continue pimping out her children post-People magazine with her new TLC show, manager Simon Fields insists the new series “is not a reality show. It’s a show that will track the creation, production and eventual launch of a new fragrance. Jennifer will appear in a creative, entrepreneurial capacity and will absolutely not feature her children and family life.”

Oh good, glad we made clear the new show would be … an informercial.

What do you do when you’re an environmental blog – uber-concered about being green, saving the planet, controlling climate change, saving the ice caps, and ensuring a better tomorrow – and you’ve got a new paperback, about living an eco-friendly lifestyle, to promote?

Kill trees by printing out scores of postcards and mailing them around town.

In the coming weeks, JetBlue will unveil a whole new ad campaign that will try to take your mind off the fact that they are no longer a discount carrier, their seatback television screens are often broken, and, as happened on our redeye flight this weekend, “non-stop” flights between Burbank and JFK may actually include a stop over in Salt Lake City.

So goes the ad campaign: No longer will you be flying on JetBlue; you’ll be jetting. They’re classy-ing it up, up in here. New slogans include “Thanks for not flying on JetBlue,” “Happy jetting,” and “Flying is for pigeons.”

And as one JetBlue staffer writes, gate agents and flight attendants will be forced to utter these phrases to the flying public.

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With BitTorrent leaks threatening to ruin the debut of Hard Candy from Kabbalah documentarian Madonna on Tuesday, she’s releasing the album early on MySpace. Beginning today, fans can stream all 12 tracks of the release. Naturally, the publicity push comes with a formal announcement, with the most hideous description of Madonna’s sound ever.

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“Barack Obama often talks about the grass-roots nature of his candidacy, but he may be running the most successful stealth marketing campaign by a presidential candidate ever.

“Since the fall, pro-Obama street art has popped up all over the country, primarily in urban areas such as New York, Chicago, Seattle and LA.

“In several cases, the Obama campaign has been directly responsible - although it has very carefully kept plausible distance, for the purposes of “street cred” and obeying the law. (Graffiti, of course, is illegal).” [NYP]

The CW network spent a fortune promoting the return of Gossip Girl with that OMFG campaign and, unintentionally, with actress Kelly Rutherford’s plot spoiler. So how come their latest ploy – a contest giveaway with Us Weekly – is the most obvious low-budget effort ever?

In exchange for your name, address, and email, you have a chance to win a tote bag and mirrored compact courtesy of the CW network. Yes, THAT IS ALL.

Is this one of the most inappropriate government logos ever? Though it’s unlikely to become the official branding for the U.K.’s Office of Government Commerce now that its X-rated factor has been determined, it did make it through the final rounds. So why will it be, um, revised?

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SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES Sprint was the official wireless carrier for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit. [BizWire]

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!

From a Showtime marketing blast: “It’s almost 4/20… and you know what that means: WEED…S! Showtime’s hit series WEEDS is back June 16th and it’s on fire. With the embers of Agrestic smoldering in her rear view mirror, Nancy Botwin is ready to exhale and start fresh. She’s packing up and moving the joint, but where?”

Playboy is teaming up up with Burton to make sure Jackson Hole and Aspen are blanketed with kid-friendly images this winter. [men.style.com]

What happens when a brilliant movie marketing campaign ends up affecting a real life person? Comedic genius!

Those “You Such Sarah Marshall” billboards, bus ads, and posters have been everywhere, in every city, over the past few weeks have, for sure, become an eyesore and need to disappear yesterday.

But for one girl in Greenfield, Massachusetts, they’ve been particularly annoying.

Her name is Sarah Marshall.

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The Thomson Corporation, the finance-health-research info mega company, is quite proud of its just-completed $16 billion takeover of news giant Reuters. That’s why it’s spending another large sum to throw the new name of its company, Thomson Reuters, in your face: It’s taking over subway stations in New York, Toronto, and London, as well as the buildings of the stock exchanges there. And if you make your way through Times Square today, perhaps you’ll catch even more inundation as the digital displays force the logo upon you. This will be different than your normal Times Square, where you can at least eat, drink, or drive the usual marketing messages.

Powerful taglines, or “powerlines” as AdAge’s Steve Cone SO CLEVERLY calls them, have gone missing from today’s marketing. You don’t see a tagline for Apple commercials anymore; you just see the bitten apple logo. Based on that alone, we’re going to agree: Taglines have died! Even if Jossip still insists on using one.

But what if an advertiser wants to bring one back? What should they do? Asks-and-answers Cone:

Are there easy-to-remember general guidelines that can increase the chance of my company creating a compelling tagline that will stand the test of time? Yes — four, to be exact.

1.) You are different; say so. Don’t use common words.

2.) Have real attitude; bypass wishy-washy phrases.

3.) Be everywhere, or you are nowhere. For a line to make a lasting impression, it must appear at all customer touch points and ideally be the headline of every marketing promotion.

4.) Yes, it’s an art. The best taglines come from individual flashes of inspiration.

So based on that advice, let’s look at some of the most well-known taglines, and see if they measure up.

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