Bruce Oldfield was once famed for designing glamorous outfits for Princess Diana. His latest project: McDonald's uniforms. All the jokes seem too obvious. While the brand will certainly get a bit of a positive halo effect for being associated with a high-fashion guy who would otherwise never set foot in the place, I can say confidently as a veteran of the McD's kitchen that Oldfield's expressed wish, "I hope they enjoy wearing the uniforms," will not come true. Sorry. And is it necessary to inflict a "jaunty neck scarf" on women working the register? The most important quality of a McDonald's uniform is that it's dark enough to hide grease spots. All this upscale designing is a waste of time, we're sorry to say. Click through for two more picture of Oldfield's highly paid work on behalf of the fast food proletariat:

Eliot Spitzer's favorite call girl, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, has finally hired a PR firm. Why she waited so long, we have no idea. If she wanted help fending off media coverage, she would have done well to hire somebody as soon as the story broke; likewise, if she's planning on capitalizing on the scandal to build her own personal brand, she'll need to strike while the iron is hot. Which was about three weeks ago. The Daily News reported that she hired Susan Blond Inc., an entertainment-heavy NYC firm whose client list has included Ice Cube, Britney Spears, David Bowie, and Criss Angel, among many others. I smell a second-rate music career about to be launched! So who is Susan Blond? An Andy Warhol theory come to life.

The new "BrandZ" ranking of the world's most powerful brands is out, and it just helps to confirm that it's only a matter of time before China is running everything. China Mobile is the fifth most powerful brand in the world, ahead of names like IBM, Apple, and McDonald's. China's most powerful brands collectively gained more than 50% in value over the past year. And China and other emerging economies are the most powerful drivers of growth for all brands. Russia is also a fast riser. The takeaway: at least we are still killing all these foreigners through our strong American Marlboro brand (#10). Below, the top 25 brands in the world, and their added value to the company, so you can sound smart at your next branding party. Yes, Google is #1:

If you're a corporate brand desperate to make your logo all-pervasive for all humanity walking the earth, but you find that skywriting is such a hassle, the solution for you has finally arrived: Flogos. It's a machine that makes "floating ads" out of soap bubbles in any shape you wish. The two-square-foot ads float hundreds of feet up in the air for up to an hour, and reportedly "fly for miles." It's about time somebody has efficiently colonized the very air surrounding us for the purpose of advertising! Can we get one in the shape of a cloud? [Live Science via Metafilter]. Click through for a bonus pic of a flying Flogos Christian cross.

Thomson Reuters is expected to plaster its logo all over New York, London and Toronto subway stations today, along with the New York Stock Exchange building and Times Square. Why? Because the company, formerly Thomson, is very excited that it just completed its takeover of Reuters and wants the whole world to care. Also, the company thinks promoting its brand will sell a few more subscriptions to its databases, like Westlaw. and help the company surpass in size its competitor Bloomberg. Let the ridiculously expensive pissing match begin! [Times]

The Atlantic is a magazine about news and culture and stuff. It has been continually published for thousands of years—its founding editor was Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar. Now, though, the internet, which has made Americans forget how to read, is killing it. They struck back recently by putting on their cover a woman who is famous for being mentally disturbed, and now they've gone so far as to bring on brand consultants. Folio reports that Atlantic Media hired "an integrated marketing agency to handle its rebranding." They're redesigning the magazine and relaunching the website! Next fall they will "roll out of a full-scale marketing campaign to communicate the brand message." This is "something the Atlantic has never done" because it is a thing that was invented by marketing agencies ten years ago. [The Atlantic]

What exactly is Starbucks doing? They came out with their revolutionary, game-changing, not quite as burnt new house coffee last week, which pairs well with chocolate marble loaf. But along with the new $11,000 machines to make said coffee, the Death Star-like chain has introduced new coffee cups, and they're... brown? Was the design consultant who knows how to appeal to yuppies sick the day that decision was made? And now the company has bigger problems: McDonald's is determined to kick Starbucks' ass right where it lives. In Seattle!

Cosmo, the sassy, sexy source of sex secrets he's too scared to tell you, is going to an incredible amount of effort to promote its August issue: the magazine is trying to break the Guinness World Record for "most people photographed on a beach in a bikini." The old record? 1,010 girls on a beach in Australia, set last year by... Cosmo! Good to see they have a hobby. They need 1,200 "chicks 18-34" to show up on Miami's South Beach next Friday, so start hitchhiking now! You'll get a free Old Navy bikini, "style to depend on available quantity and selection." Unfortunately swimsuit photos appeal primarily to straight men, who don't buy Cosmo anyways, so this is all a big waste of time. After the jump, photos of the last record, which is still perfectly good and pointless if you ask us:

NBC has a new show coming up this season called "Kings," which will be a joint-promotional deal with suicide-exploiting insurance company Liberty Mutual. They're the ones who promoted their shitty branding website by buying up Google Adwords like "Paul Tilley," the name of the ad exec who committed suicide in February. Classy! The show will be "a modern-day retelling of the David and Goliath story. The themes of the show are meant to be consistent with Liberty Mutual's "Responsibility Project," which promotes personal responsibility." Boycott this show responsibly, please. [NYT]

New York might be called the Big Apple, and apples themselves might be beautiful creations of nature, but as far as Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs is concerned, Gotham has no business affixing depictions of the fruit to anything conceivably related to its products. Like, uh, organic cotton shopping bags, which carry the logo and are produced by the city's GreenNYC campaign in conjunction with grocer Whole Foods. Someone might buy one of those bags and expect it to be functionally equivalent to a MacBook Pro! Ditto for the bus shelters and hybrid taxis that carry the symbol - they look just like Apple products. So Apple and the city are slugging it out in trademark filings, Wired News reports today. Dig through Apple's filing and you'll find the company is specifically upset about the little angular leaf at the top of GreenNYC's logo. But also, Apple has convinced itself that its own mark is somehow synonymous with the entire city of New York, and it looks like maybe the Times is to blame for this delusion:

A counterpoint for all you Apple-haters out there: a new study by researchers at Duke University found that "even the briefest exposure to the Apple logo may make you behave more creatively." How did they measure that? By having the subjects list "all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall." That's science for you! If only gazing at the Apple logo could help me think of a good joke for this post. The actual scientific findings:

Gays: Here is one of the plainest insights you will ever get into how you are perceived by the liquor industry, and, by extension, by the advertising industry that gets paid to understand consumers such as yourself. Pictured here is an ad for Basil Hayden's whiskey that was placed in "general market" publications. Its tagline reads, "When you walk into a bar, you're on stage." After the jump, the tagline for the version of that same ad that was placed into Gay/ Lesbian publications:

If there's one thing a mobile phone does not need, it's a "Philosophy." If there's another thing a mobile phone does not need, it's a luxury brand above and beyond whatever the brand is of the actual phone manufacturer. Of course this means that today any asshole with $550 burning a hole in his pocket can buy a Samsung phone by Giorgio Armani. Has Armani suddenly hired a team of engineers who have built a revolutionary new microchip that maximizes the phone's performance? No, Armani has done what he does best: Print his name in little letters on the phone, then wildly increase the price. This type of product's success (still going strong after six months) says a lot about the human need for validation through conspicuous consumption. But more importantly, it says that any old nonsensical piece of marketing copy can now be passed off as a statement of "Philosophy":

"For some children, watching "Dora the Explorer" on television is becoming passé. Now, they want to be Dora." Mother. Fuckers. They want to be Dora because multinational corporations are pouring millions into online games that masquerade as harmless diversions while actually indoctrinating children into brand worship! Nickelodeon is spending $100 million to draw in the children of the world with shiny games. Entertainment, retailers, junk food, and other huge business sectors are all using these games to lure kids into influencing purchasing decisions—some games are even designed for kids "on the laps of their moms." It's truly one of the most insidious forms of... hey, "Reese's Puffs Cereal Snowboard Slalom?" Sweet. [NYT]

With ICQ lending its name to an Israeli toothpaste manufacturer and Google trucking branded ice cream bars to its Mountain View headquarters, no wonder Jimmy Wales is thinking about how Wikipedia can cash in on brand licensing. The only problem: Wales's marketing ideas are as dull as his sexual fantasies. Board games? Discovery Channel specials? Boring!

A distressing new survey reveals that last month's Day Without A Starbucks—when the friendly coffee conglomerate closed for three hours in a gaudy PR stunt that placed the Olsen Twins in mortal peril—was a failure. While three quarters of all consumers knew that the closing happened, not even half knew why the closing took place [Ad Age]. Do you?

MasterCard has just released a new credit card for the good people of Dubai—the good, rich, rich, rich people. The Dubai First Royale MasterCard is invitation-only, offered to a "select" group of elites who "must possess the right criteria in terms of social standing and profile." And are very rich. The card itself is diamond-studded—practical and functional. It offers benefits like a huge credit line and a personal concierge. Neither you nor we shall ever have one of these. Sob. Below, a guide to other deluxe credit cards neither of us will ever be invited to own; press your nose to the glass and salivate at the pretty, pretty plastic.

Sony's Bravia line is famous for making incredible, spectacular ads. They did one that involved dropping a quarter of a million Super Balls. They did another in which they blew up 70,000 liters of paint. You get the idea. Awesomeness! Their newest (unreleased) ad has them covering entire city streets in Miami with bubbles. What does this have to do with selling TVs? No idea! Is it worth it to make wildly expensive performance art pieces as branding exercises for a line of electronics? Who knows? But we have some pictures of them filming the ad [via Adland], and a clip of that crazy super ball production, after the jump. If you can parse the logic here, you are either a great philosopher or a great salesman.

What would you do if, out of the blue, you—a reporter—got a mysterious scrawled-on envelope in the mail one day with only a pair of panties in it? Probably be happy, if you're a man. But what if, the next day, you got an anonymous ransom note-style card with your picture on it, reading "I've got my eyes on you?" Load the gun and call the fucking police, that's what. But don't worry! It was all a PR stunt by some "branding agency" to get some media love! What. The. Hell? Bad move, to say the least. This is America, where reporters shoot first, ask questions later. [via Ad Age]

If someone says to you, "Quick, name a modern-day equivalent of the exiled Jacobite Scottish noble Bonnie Prince Charlie," nobody would blame you for blurting out, "Jerry O'Connell, the B-actor who got his start in the 1986 coming-of-age tale Stand By Me." That's exactly what the people at Drambuie liqueur thought, too. So they signed up O'Connell, one of the five most famous actors to appear in Jerry Maguire, to add a little star power to the 2008 "Drambuie Pursuit Competition," which will have him racing across 100 miles of harsh terrain in the Scottish highlands, retracing the ancient steps of a fleeing Bonnie Prince Charlie—who legendarily held the secret Drambuie recipe, dummy! Hard to parse the intricate branding strategies in all this, but we think the message is: Jerry O'Connell is a drunk. Below, the choicest fabricated quotes from the press release, and a bonus clip of O'Connell's impression of Tom Cruise's Scientology video—one of his career highlights.