E! just aired an "exclusive" long version of an American Express advertisement involving Tina Fey and Martin Scorsese. That sounds like a cheap gimmick — we're supposed to get excited about first-run commercials now? — but it's actually a funny ad and the most interesting part of the Emmy awards so far, despite all the red carpet coverage. It also manages to make people briefly car about travel agents, even though the vast majority of them were made obsolete by the internet. Click the video icon to watch. UPDATE: With second ad.

Microsoft's new Seinfeld ad campaign proves you can't predict success. Here are five goofy ads that worked — plus the clip that probably sold Microsoft on Seinfeld. Above: A parody of Jacques Cousteau's undersea documentaries for Sun Microsystems.

Are you excited that Vanity Fair and American Express' glamorous "Campaign New York" launches in a mere 40 days? The "dazzling two-week series of events," as far as we can tell, offers the following dazzling events: a discount hotel room, a book signing at Barneys, and a "cocktail and shopping night" during which you can swill booze and go spend money on Madison Avenue. That's it. Any AmEx card holder attempting to enter the Waverly Inn at any time during the course of the dazzling two-week series of events will be laughed off the premises by Graydon Carter himself, who disapproves of riff-raff. [Campaign NY via Jossip]

• For his next act, former Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz may jump to private equity. [NYP]

For MarketWatch readers, American Express wants to brand itself as company that understands how to "drive growth through technology." And so the the credit card company presents the Open forum, featuring Internet visionary Jimbo Wales and his faroff gaze. Who better to explain the "nature of direct marketing" or demonstrate the value of "reaching customers?" Besides, Wales has shown he's very comfortable using his card.

Sorry to get your hopes up, folks. After early reports that American Express was giving cardholders $200 refunds on their iPhones — after Apple slashed the price earlier this month — it now seems the company has reconsidered its generosity. Early adopter Muhammad Saleem blogs that he only got a $100 refund, not the $200 he requested. An AmEx rep told him that he had to apply to Apple, which now offers a $100 credit to premature iPhone buyers, to get the other half. Saleem and other cardholders should consider themselves lucky to get anything at all, though. American Express discontinued its price-protection benefit last fall, and the company is only offering iPhone refunds at its discretion — likely because it's a high-profile case of a price drop, and it hopes to win positive publicity and customer goodwill.

[UPDATE BELOW]What's up with the bubbly former host of Rocketboom, which was supposed to be the Internet's first huge news show before it leveled off? According to the London Times, Amanda Congdon's show for ABC News is "currently in the world's top 40,000 blogs," which puts it somewhere below great-soups-ive-eaten.blogspot.com. But Congdon has always been proud of her second career as a host for corporate stunt videos, and she recently starred in an American Express ad (shown below) shot in San Francisco. It's for a good cause, in a way: AmEx is giving away up to $5 million for a world-improving project to be selected by its customers. Metaphor-makers rejoice: The "cable car" carrying journotainer Amanda through the city in this video is a fake. Okay, okay, a "replica."