So many dumb moments in business, so little time. But Business 2.0 mag has their picks for the 101 dumbest of 2006.

Wal-Mart is #1, for hiring a big firm to create their "Candidate Wal-Mart" campaign. #2 is Northwest Airlines, for giving their employees a "How To Save Money" booklet after laying them off. #3 is the contest McDonald's held in Japan, with the winners getting free mp3 players with a virus on them. The rest of the top 10 are GM, Kazakhstan, Steve Wynn, The New York Times, Spirit Air, Porter County, and Comcast.

There are 101 in all, so grab a hot beverage and get comfortable. You can't see the entire list on one page, which is a little annoying, but there is a handy scroll function at the bottom.

• Hispanic agency Conill has been named the "Multicultural Agency of the Year" by AdAge based largely on the quantity and quality of the clients they landed in 2006.
  
• Car makers are paying Car & Driver magazine to take their car reviews and turn them into multimedia online "test drives." This allows the title to directly monetize the reviews, which make up a large part of their content, but does raise concerns over those reviews being watered down to appease potential advertisers.
  
• The L.A. Times has taken their Envelope blog and turned it into a targeted print publication that, as we get deeper into Oscar season, is full of "For Your Consideration" ads. For a look at what kind of "FYC" ads the studios are putting online, check out the Adverlicio.us archive.

Continue reading AdAge In, Roughly, 120 More Seconds

• Oh please for the love of all that's good and holy in this world can we stop with the pandering already? First Time names "You" its Person of the Year and now "The Consumer" has been named the Agency of the Year by AdAge. This has to stop no matter how hard you try and justify it.
  
• As a media property, the "American Idol" brand is worth more than $2.5 billion. That comes not only from the TV show that started it all but the multiple spin-offs that it's spawned.
  
• Author Jeff Chester has put out a book that claims the American public has been "brainwashed" into relinquishing its rights to privacy by the marketing industry. Between tracking more of our behavior and pressuring the government to not protect privacy the.....AHHHH my chip just went off....it burns......!!!!

• The United Kingdom, according to Slashfood, is about to introduce advertising regulations that would put cheese in the "junk food" category.
  
• Engadget talks about Head & Shoulders introducing a photo booth that alerts you to any dandruff you might have, thereby ensuring you have a lousy day.
• Blogging Stocks says that the much-touted redesign of the Wall Street Journal, meant largely to lower print expenses when it's online where the ad revenue is, comes about three years too late to really mean anything.
  
• Blogging Stocks also points out that while eBay has survived largely on its good user reputation, many critical voices have been muffled by the true believers.
  
• Lots of good stuff from the BS crew, with this piece on how there might not be the advertiser support for Fox's upcoming business channel debut.
• TV Squad has a screen shot of the web promotion CBS has up for "CSI: Miami," the next run of which will feature some character shifts that are alluded to in this Beatles-esque picture.
• TUAW mentions that Apple was named by MediaPost to be their "Marketer of the Year."
• Slashfood says scented ads, especially scent-infused packaging, are just going to become more and more common.
• Joystiq talks about Burger King's crowing over selling two million King-themed Xbox games.

I'm a magazine junkie. Seriously, it's an illness. I probably spend more money on magazines and newspapers than I do on food and clothing. And that's not counting the mags I read for free as I drink my chai in the Border's Cafe.

Advertising Age has looked at the magazine covers from 2006 and picked the 10 best. Some of these I can't complain about. The New Yorker cover is simple and powerful, the Time cover is clever, and the Wired cover manages to look good and have someone on the cover that sums up the year (and he's hacking an iPod!). But the Swindle cover is at least two years out of date, and the Vogue and Bicycling covers are just plain boring (they must have had other covers during the year that would have been better choices).

Do you remember any covers that caught your eye in 2006?

ASIFA-Hollywood recently announced the nominees for the 34th annual Annie Awards, which are given for excellence in animation in both movies and television. The following animated commercials were included this year:

Candy Factory, a PSA for RAT (Reject All Tobacco), a funny spoof on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Giraffe, created by Z Animation for the St. Louis Zoo.

"Billeive," a stop-animated spot for ESPN. See below:

"Dancing Couple," not a terribly exciting spot, created for Hilton Journeys:

"Dragon," a spot for United Airlines that has little if nothing to do with air travel, but the dragon looks cool:

I'm not quite sure what the definition of "family friendly programming" is to the Family Friendly Programming Forum, but they gave out awards to TV shows the other night.

The FFPF is made up of advertisers that represent 43 different companies, and they give out awards to TV shows and actors that promote family-friendly programming during prime time hours. Some of the choices are fairly predictable: Dancing with the Stars, The Ron Clark Story, High School Musical, and Ugly Betty. But they also gave an award to CBS' Numb3rs, which is a 10pm show about murder, robbery, and assault. Hmmm.

The show will air on the CW on December 12. Question: is this show also eligible to win the award, sometime next year?

• TNS Media Research has just signed a deal with Starcom Media Group that will have them providing second-by-second commercial ratings data to the agency. The data will only come from 300,000 Charter Communications customers in the Los Angeles market but this is a huge step that could spell trouble for Nielsen's never-quite off the ground system.
• Young & Rubicam woke up this morning wondering where $61 million went to. That's because Orbitz has decided to take its account elsewhere at a time when the online travel service seems to be gaining market share versus its competitors.
• Media buying and planning for Kodak will now be handled by MindShare Worldwide and Neo@Ogilvy. The account is valued at around $100 million and comes as the camera maker has been shifting dollars from TV to online efforts.
  

• Lightspeed Research thinks it has the key to overcoming an overly-surveyed population: Giveaways. Right, cause that won't skew the results at all. Does no one remember when Pinky & the Brain tried to take over the world by offering free t-shirts? That didn't work out well and this won't either.
• Sony is adding Grouper and other online executions to the stable of offerings it presents to media buyers when the syndication team goes knocking on doors.
  
• AdAge has named Toyota its "Marketer of the Year" in recognition of the gains it's made on the Detroit-based auto companies.

• Following the lead of NBC Universal, the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau has sent out an advisory to the rest of its membership advising them to not participate in Nielsen's advertising ratings program. Apparently the CAB has problems with the completely unreliable system. Go figure.
• AdAge has named the September 19th, 2005 cover of The New Yorker as the Best Magazine Cover of the Year. The cover featured a drawing of the Bush administration cabinet members under water following the Katrina-related flooding in New Orleans.
  
• Watch the video interview with Jeffrey Diskin, VP of brand management for Hilton Hotels about the chain's renovations and revitalization.

Advertising Age

• Magazine Editor of the Year: Anna Wintour
• Magazine of the Year: More
• Publishing Executive of the Year: Susan Lyne

• Following a reorganization of the importers it uses to get its beer into the U.S., Corona has consolidated its advertising work with Cramer-Kasselt, Chicago. Corona spent over $41 million on media buying last year and that number is expected to grow considering the beer is among the most popular imported brands on the market.
  
• Crispen, Porter & Bogusky, in their first work on the Miller High Life account, are returning to the tactic of positioning the beer as something that "real men" drink. This follows a campaign that for some reason tried to brand it as an upscale drink for softies, something CP&B's campaign will actually acknowledge and poke a bit of fun at.
  
• The sky is blue, water is wet, I need a drink and Nike has been named Digital Marketer of the Year by AdAge. All things anyone could have predicted.
  

• If you want to buy a 30-second spot during "American Idol", you better have $700,000 lying around. Of course that's the high-end of the payment schedule. You could get a discounted price of a bit over $500,000 if you make some deals with the producers of the show. That price-tag makes it the most expensive show on TV. I will now go impale myself on a Sharpie.
• Watch the videos and read the reports on the 2006 Hispanic Creative Advertising Award winners.
  
• Matthew Creamer cuts through the BS and lets you know exactly what's happening during Advertising Week next week.
  

Yup, they give Emmy awards for commercials too, and over the weekend Fed-Ex and Hallmark won awards (it's at the Creative Emmy Awards, held a week before the regular Emmys).

Fed-Ex won for "Stick," which is the commercial featuring the cavemen. You can view the ad here, but I can't seem to get it to work for some reason. Hallmark won for "Required Reading," which you can view here through the wonders of YouTube.

• Two Focus Media executives from Focus Media, a media buying firm, were convicted of stealing $31 million from clients that included Universal Studios and Sears Roebuck. The two took money from clients and redirected it toward what was described as "personal uses."
• Drug maker AstraZeneca has said that, contrary to current popular opinion, the number of risk warnings in drug ads should be limited. Three risk warnings is optimal but once you get over five consumers get lost in a flood of information, according to a study the ran.
  
• You can click here and watch the top three spots in contention for the Cannes Film Grand Prix.

• PriceWaterhouseCoopers is predicting that online ad spending will jump significantly between now and 2010. Their estimate has spending rising to $230 billion in 2010 from $177 in 2005. I actually have two problems with this estimate: First, I think it's drastically low. Second, it doesn't seem to take into account the idea that the web in 2010 will likely look very little like the web in 2005. So when they say $230 billion does that include a likely shift of TV viewing to the web? There are about 17 other questions I could ask along those same lines.
  
• Just like how the content of television will likely change in the next few years so too will the model of how people pay for their television viewing habits. One of the biggest forces driving this is the idea of viewers actually paying to watch ad-free shows. That means advertisers will have to adapt to a new environment, something I get the idea they don't like doing and avoid whenever they can.
  
• Finally, there's a lot of coverage of the Cannes Lions Festival going on. Various people are attending parties, various agencies are winning awards. And it's all a big celebration of creativity that has little to nothing to do with improving the sales of clients' products.