A tipster at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia tells us Martha and Co. have a few new rules for staffers in the new offices. Bring nothing! Visual proof included below:

Obama's inauguration being held on the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. day? Historic! Moving! And, for corporate America, a great chance to get a two-for-one deal on its annual "We Love Diversity" ads.

A flack for Ketchum named James Andrews had to fly into Memphis yesterday for a client meeting with FedEx, and observed, correctly, that Memphis is a hellhole. This could get him fired.

As the mobs of newly unemployed people tire of eating squirrel, they determine to do anything necessary to land that next job. Even if it means cheating on the world's easiest "personality test":

The liberal portion of the Supreme Court says that average jerks can sue cigarette companies for fraudulently marketing their light cigarettes—which kill you—as safe. Conservatives say no, just shut up and die. Really!

"Good" news: a massive real estate developer and a sugar magnate may buy the Miami Herald. Hey, then let's sell the Washington Post to the CIA! This is a CHILLING VISION of newspapers' future.

Corporate "futurist" and salvia-smoking internet surfer Faith Popcorn is back—from the future! And she's brought predictions, for the benefit of the world. Would you like to know what the magical year 2009 will hold, according to a lady who has somehow convinced companies to pay money to her totally made-up "trend consultancy" for an astounding period of time? Behold the "New Rules of Engagement" for 2009, year of wonder:

Hey, one more ominous day in the increasingly ominous life of the New York Times Co. The fact that the Times Co. announced plans to mortgage or sell its fancy headquarters building on the same day that the Tribune Co. took a step towards bankruptcy is really bad karma. Check this out, people: The New York Times Co. will eventually go bankrupt if it does not make a drastic change. No amount of fanboy love for Frank Rich or outcry from the journalism establishment will change this fact. Who will step in with a plan to save the paper of record? We will, improbably!

Hey, why all the layoffs this week? Please don't say "It's the economy, stupid." That's really annoying. Of course it is the economy, but this week has been bad even by the standards of the last three months. Because it has special qualities! Qualities that, unfortunately, conspired to screw thousands of people out of employment. After the jump, we'll have a little review of the most recent bad news, and explain why everybody got executed just after they finished their last Thanksgiving leftovers.

With so many layoffs going down today, it's a good time to take a look at how, exactly, a layoff memo should be written. Actually, any time you're critiquing a flood of layoff memos is by definition a bad time. But we'll disregard that for the moment. People need to be let down in the proper way, lest they get justifiably angry enough to put managers up against the wall. After the jump, we analyze five elements of today's memos that illustrate everything you corporate flacks need to know about firing people like us:

General Motors caught a leeetle bit of flack this week for flying its executives to Washington on a private jet in order to beg for a taxpayer bailout. "Hey," said politicians, the media, and the general public, "you have less than zero money. Should you really have spent thousands on a private jet?" We would also add, "Shouldn't you have driven a car?" Later GM and its fellow broke automakers left Washington with no money, making this one of the colossal PR fuckups of 2008, and possibly of the preceding decade as well. But everything is different now, because GM is going to have somewhat fewer private jets. So please give them some multiple of billions of dollars okay? They did have five company planes. Now they're cutting down to just three. Tightening the belt!

"Viral" ad campaigns: everybody's sick of them! What to do? Just think of a more appealing name for them. Because appearance, not reality, is what matters, and if you agree with that you just might have a future in advertising. "Viral" campaigns are now called "Dandelions," because they flutter beautifully across the landscape, sowing their brand messages that will grow into beautiful brand flowers. This, according to a new agency that is perfecting the art of being a smart sellout: The agency is called Dandelion, of course, because why let someone else run off with your awesome viral marketing analogy? And Dandelion is not a vulgar "ad" agency; rather, it is a "brand storyteller." For reals. All your favorites are lining up for some of that sweet marketing budget pie:

Cartoonish plutocrat Stephen Schwarzman would rather not be known as a cartoonish plutocrat! You may recall how the multibillionaire CEO of Blackstone Group threw himself a $3 million star-studded birthday party (with Rod Stewart!) last year and thereby became the living symbol of the wretched excesses of Wall Street money-jugglers in this modern boom era. Well now that everybody is broke he regrets doing that stuff, okay:

Every once in a while some career marketing exec will have a blinding flash of conscience, and declare that they're quitting the rat race and taking their expertise to a nonprofit where it can do some good for the world. That's not usually what happens. Usually, a marketing exec surveying the fundamental emptiness of their career will have that same twinge of conscience, and decide that the way to solve it is to bring some real do-gooding purpose into the marketing industry. On that note, allow me to introduce you to "purpose-based marketing," just the latest futile quest by a prominent career adman! Jim Stengel is retiring as head of marketing at P&G—the world's biggest advertiser—and starting up his own marketing firm that he says is about "defining what a company does — beyond making money — and how it can make its customers' lives better." Though the WSJ describes this approach as "newfangled," it's been around for years. You know what the ceiling is on the market for this type of thing? The ceiling is how much extra leftover cash companies have to throw around after they do their real marketing, which has the goal of making money. Nothing "beyond making money" comes about until the "making money" part is accomplished. Corporate social responsibility is considered a luxury product. Which is why Jim Stengel's firm is doomed, according to his less conscience-plagued peers:

This economic downturn has, surprisingly, not killed the "branding" industry, which exists for the sole purpose of allowing graphic design majors to soak clueless corporate behemoths out of millions of dollars for what amounts to a few tweaks of a computer design template. We salute you, brand consultants! You are the hustlers of a new generation. Pictured is the inanimate, non-dynamic, old Pepsi logo; and after the jump, the "more dynamic and more alive" new logo that Pepsi just rolled out at a cost that will eventually total hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide:

Martha Stewart, a lady who made billions of dollars talking about stuff for your house and dinner parties and things like that and also went to jail once, is already feuding with her company's new co-CEO, Wendy Harris Millard. Recall that, just this past summer, Stewart's company pushed out Susan Lyne, the former CEO. Now even Millard (Lyne's replacement) herself acknowledges there's been "healthy debate," which means the shit must have been too bad to even try to deny. The "differences" are attributed to different "personalities." For example, Martha Stewart's personality is that of a tyrant. [NYP via Cityfile]

Goodness, the bad news just doesn't stop for Harvey Weinstein. The movie mogul and Weinstein Co. head—who recently lost his bid to move Project Runway, his big moneymaker, to Lifetime—has had a rough time lately, dealing with everything from a flagging fashion line to a flagging internet company to a flagging video distribution service. So much flagging! And now the precarious nature of Weinstein's business is clear to everybody; his own executives are abandoning him, in a terrible job market:

Are you a weary office drone who chokes down a dry, overpriced sandwich from the local deli in front of your computer every day, wishing that you could take a full hour to relax and eat some quality food for once in your miserable life? Well the ConAgra corporation feels your pain! And in order to help you they've enlisted someone you, the little people, can look up to: Ivanka Trump. She is using a modern "blog" to reach all the depressed, overworked potential ConAgra lunch customers! It all began last week, when Ivanka, daughter of The Donald and main squeeze of The Jared Kushner, informed the public via some blog that she would soon be setting up a "lunch trade" to revitalize your boring existence:

Google is, like, everywhere. It tells you how to find everything. It runs everything on the internet. Happily for human sanity, Google maintains its status as massive dark lord of information without running a huge amount of normal consumer advertising, or plastering its logo over every bus stop and baseball stadium. Because the company is smart enough to know that if it advertised at a level proportional to its scale, everyone would get sick of it. But maybe Google's changing its mind!

Last week Starbucks' ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy, quit the Starbucks account. As you can imagine, it's pretty fucking rare for something like that to happen, especially with a company of that scale. At the time, the agency just mumbled something about how it was "time to move on." But now the truth has come out: Starbucks is a notorious headache. Thanks largely to "mercurial" CEO Howard Schultz. Wieden & Kennedy (also behind this Nike campaign, incidentally) spent four long years working for Starbucks, and, according to an excellent Ad Age story today, none of that time was particularly happy. But Schultz was pals with Wieden's founder, so it went on and on. The conflict can be read either as a case of a prima donna client, OR the case of prima donna ad agencies not feeling "appreciated" for their brilliance: