If you’re selling something, there are many ways you can get the word out. For print, it’s as simple as putting the name of what you’re selling next to a depressed shirtless kid on a beach. Or you could use the internet, where you have the benefit of being able to punish people not interested in your ad by having a new picture of MILFS going wild in the back of the Bang Bus appear every time they try to close it. But every now and then some genius marketer tries to defy the limits of the impossible and get more creative than a constant barrage of hot moms getting seduced in the back of a van. Listed below are some of the more notable attempts, each judged on Creativity and Effectiveness.

FACE BILLBOARDS
An advertising agency called Cunning Stunts is offering to rent student foreheads for £88.20 a week and put corporate logos on them. The rules are: the student has to wear it for three hours a day, the student cannot tamper with his or her logo, and the student has to be out in public view. The problem is that the journey of education requires that students have to do some pretty ugly things. For example, no one’s going to be thirsty for a Coke when they see its logo tattooed on the forehead of an pre-vet student artificially inseminating a sheep.

Creativity: 1/10
Slapping a corporate logo on something isn’t that revolutionary an idea, even if what you’re slapping it on is totally insane. However, lengthier forehead ads might have been. “Come down to Murray’s Auto Showroom! Tell us this lunatic’s face sent you and get a free hot dog!”

Effectiveness: 1/10
Chances are a forehead brand isn’t going to affect your soft drink preference, but the forehead can still be a powerful communication tool. For example, if your friend passes out at a party, writing obscenities next to the naughty drawings where his eyebrows used to be is a very effective way to tell the people on the bus that his friends are assholes.

NAME YOURSELF AFTER OUR VIDEOGAME
To promote their videogame about exploding dinosaurs, Acclaim UK offered to pay people to have their names legally changed to “Turok” for one year. And if you were wondering about the going rate for living with a retarded barbarian name for a year, it’s a whopping $770. Three thousand people applied for this exciting money making offer. However, not all of them were accepted. Acclaim spokesman Andrew Bloch explained, “It’s not a gimmick... Every form of their identity will have to change for this to work.” I’m not sure exactly how much Acclaim was expecting people to change their lives for the cost of a new set of tires, but it’s hard to imagine someone shouting from their cubicle, “I, Turok, lord of the dinosaur hunters, refuse to go to Olive Garden for lunch twice in the same week! Turok has spoken!”

Creativity: 7/10
If you’re NOT an Indian on a dinosaur killing adventure through time, having the name “Turok” is a lot like having the name “Yank My Underwear Hard When I Turn Around.”

Effectiveness: 1/10
I have a theory that this wouldn’t work even if you changed your name to a good videogame. I support this theory with my findings that while I was named Donkey Kong for 3 years, there was no significant change in the surrounding Donkey Kong community.

BREASTFEEDING FOR PEACE
Peace is one of those things that everyone wants to buy but no one has really found a way to package. Until now. The recent Breastfeeding For Peace rally combined the nutrition of breastfeeding with all the great taste of harmonic unity of mankind. Whether the tyrants of the world heard their message of anti-war is doubtful since it really was mixed in with a lot of fun facts about the benefits of raising a breastfed baby.

Creativity: 8/10
Normally if you want to use a baby to stop war, you place it near the fighting and let its innocent gaze reveal to those nearby the true horror of war. It probably won’t work as well if you’re just suckling it while you wander around and complain, but it’s at least groundbreaking.

Effectiveness: 1/10
Everyone’s heard of anti-war rock concerts. And although they don’t stop war, the money they raise can be used to kidnap homeless people and transform them into awesome peacekeeping cyborgs. The problem with the Breastfeeding For Peace rally is that it doesn’t raise any money, and it’s really hard to make cyborgs with just a bunch of milk-filled babies.

FIGHTING CRIME WITH PIE
From 1977 to 1982, the back page of comic books featured some of the most innovative pie marketing in the history of snacks. Hostess made over 100 ads featuring super heroes in cupcake, Twinkie, and fruit pie-related adventures. These could be anything from foiling a villain’s plan by throwing him a pie to using a bag of Twinkies on an angry mob as a less-lethal form of crowd control. There’s even one where Wonder Woman confronts “The Fat Lady” to uncover the shocking secrets of The Maltese Cupcake, the half-cupcake half-monster predecessor to the modern cupcake. And while it’s nice to see that the heroes are finding endorsement work, I have trouble not considering all the outer space Nazis that went unpunched while Wonder Woman was screwing around with her deranged cupcake investigations. (You can see an exhaustingly complete collection of these ads here: www.seanbaby.com/hostess.htm)

Creativity: 10/10
In an interview with Bob Rozakis, a writer of several of the ads, he told me, “We were instructed that the heroes could never eat the cupcakes, Twinkies or fruit pies because that could be interpreted as an endorsement of the product.” That means that although megalomaniacs and murderers could eat them, the heroes maintained their integrity as men and women who advertise, but don’t endorse pie. If that doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because nothing as imaginative as super heroes fighting with Twinkies could come from a sane mind.

Effectiveness: 10/10
Something about seeing Batman stop a kidnapper in a giant dog suit by tossing him a cupcake not only makes you really hungry for a cupcake, it might inspire you to start a Neighborhood Cupcake Tossing Watch and take back the streets!

“GET CHIPPED!”
Like in movies about alternate futures where the Germans won, Applied Digital Solutions has invented an implantable human ID chip that can transmit exactly where you are at all times. The twist is this: Instead of it being forcibly embedded in you by evil German robots, they’re asking everyone to just volunteer to pay for it! To help them reach this goal, they’ve marketed the tagline “Get Chipped!” and offered a $50 dollar discount to the first 100,000 people to register. To everyone else, they’ve offered nothing less than total annihilation at the hands of their 100,000 chip-controlled cyberslaves.

Creativity: 9/10
Employers will love people “getting chipped!” It’s not only a great way to see if your employees are actually sick at home or if they’re at the tattoo parlor, but it will give you the exact global positioning coordinates you need to vaporize them from space with the orbital death ray included in every order of 50 or more chips.

Effectiveness: 1/10
A fifty dollar discount isn’t really enough of a reward to install a device that will almost certainly be used to take control of your mind by a corrupt future government. If I’m putting a Big Brother chip in my arm, I at least want a guaranteed exemption from enslavement in the year 2010’s robo mining plants.