As it turns out, Electronic Arts’ most popular game on Facebook, The Sims Social, is a perfect candidate for in-game advertising.

“It lends itself well with brands,” said Dave Madden, EA’s SVP of global media solutions. “Across The Sims Social, there’s nutrition, hygiene and careers.”

After all, it’s much harder to work a bottle of shampoo into a game that’s set in the forest or at a poker table. But when a game is about sleeping, eating microwave dinners or taking showers, that sort of product placement becomes much easier.

That’s how Unilever got interested.

In January, the massive consumer brands company — known for being the second-largest advertiser in the world — kicked off a multimillion dollar, year-long advertising campaign with EA.

It started with providing a virtual Dove Hair Spa in the Sims’ bathroom, where people’s avatars shampooed using the “Care & Repair with Dove Hair Therapy shower.” Upcoming Unilever products will include ice cream brands for the spring and summer, such as the new Magnum Mini ice cream bars, Yosicle ice pops, Cornetto ice cream cones and Heartbrand ice cream.

Because the advertisements offer virtual goods for free, players don’t typically mind interacting with the product placements. The Sims Social offers a fairly large global audience, attracting roughly three million daily users and 17.2 million monthly active users to make it one of the top 15 games on Facebook, according to AppData.

While advertising in social games by Electronic Arts or other big publishers like Zynga isn’t new, Madden said it is becoming more routine.

“Everyone knows the audience is there, and that they are spending a lot of time in the games, but from a media standpoint, it’s still been fairly new,” he said. “For a global company like Unilever to want to partner with EA and launch a campaign globally, it’s an indication that gaming is finding a stage.”

To accommodate the interest, Madden said they’ve created a rate card, developed four types of in-game advertising features, and have determined a calendar for how much integration work the developers can handle.

Here are the four advertising types that EA has focused on:

1. Traffic Drivers: Typically, these ads drive players in the game to visit a brand’s Facebook page, where they can download a free in-game virtual good. In a two-week period, more than one million players from The Sims redeemed the Dove Hair Spa virtual items in their games, and 50 percent of the players chose to “Like” the brand on their own accord.
2. Quests: These are the deepest and most involved. Players will have to take a number of steps inside the game to earn a valuable item at the end. For instance, Toyota launched a quest where players earned a Prius.
3. Store Tabs: In the virtual goods store, there will be a whole tab dedicated to the brand. Unilever, which plans to do all four types of advertising, plans to roll out a Dove tab, where users will see five items related to vanity and hair care.
4. Media Integrations: Users can watch a short video advertisement or other type of media, to unlock a virtual good.

Solve Media has an idea. The ad tech company will let you skip the “pre-roll” commercials before Web clips. But only after you’ve typed a branding message into a text box.

So, rather than watch an ad for Toyota’s RAV4 before you watch a video on AOL’s Huffington Post, you can now type in “no time to waste” and go right to the video. You can see it in action here, and there’s also an explainer video at the bottom of this post.

This may sound familiar. Solve Media employed the same mechanism — “type a branding phrase, and we’ll give you access to something” — a couple years ago, when it used it in place of captchas, the random text strings some sites use for security reasons.

Like that one, this gambit has conceptual logic working for it, especially for marketers — getting someone to type your brand’s name or campaign slogan, in return for something they value, seems like a good thing.

This one seems harder to sell to Web video watchers, though. The work/reward ratio seems off.

Yes, pre-rolls can be annoying, especially when the ad is long and the clip is short. But I’ve generally gotten pretty good at tuning out whenever they pop up. Asking me to lean forward and type in order to skip them — particularly when YouTube and Hulu often let me skip them with a single click — seems like a lot of work, when I could just zone out instead.

But maybe I’m particularly zen when it comes to ads. I don’t really mind most of them, anyway. Particularly when they help pay my bills.

Some of you seem more agitated by this sort of thing, so you tell me: Are you willing to type a marketing message in order to avoid watching a marketing message?

Solving the Pre-Roll Blues from Solve Media on Vimeo.

[Shutterstock/iQoncept]

Ad tech firm Resonate has a simple pitch along those lines: It says it can figure out what different groups of Internet users care about, and where to find them on the Web.

The Reston, Va.-based start-up has been at it for four years, and just raised a big series B round led by Revolution Growth, the new fund led by former AOLers Steve Case, Ted Leonsis and Donn Davis. Resonate won’t announce the total amount of the raise, but a person familiar with the company says it’s $22 million. Earlier investors like Greycroft Partners, LLC and iNovia Capital put another $7 million into the company, and some of them have reupped, as well.

Lots of ad tech companies promise to target Web surfers based on their online behavior, and some are now saying they can tie in offline behavior, like voting records (!), as well.

For now, at least, Resonate is avoiding that kind of targeting. Instead, it recruits panels of Internet users, asks them to complete comprehensive surveys on their likes, values, etc., and tracks their surfing patterns. Then it uses that data to figure out where to find people who will be most receptive to particular pitches.

The idea: While marketers might want to advertise a new light salad dressing on a food site that caters to women, Resonate might figure out that a sports site with a big male audience would be a better bet.

Resonate started out selling itself to political advertisers, and CEO Bryan Gernert says he’ll be doing a bunch of that this year. But he says the company is primarily focused on brand advertising, and counts McDonald’s, Verizon and Toyota as clients. Last year, Resonate did “north of $10 million” in revenue, he says.

Hence the car company’s latest campaign, which features a newish crop of YouTube hitmakers. Sometimes they’re making a direct reference to the clip that made them (sort of) famous. But if these things work, it’s not because they require the viewer to make the connection between TV and the Web.  The two work just fine in parallel. Perhaps there’s a metaphor there.

Jorge & Alexa Narvaez, perched on a Santa Fe:

And here’s their best-known clip, a cover of Edward Sharpe’s “Home” (a song advertisers love):

Fog and Smog embracing the Elantra:

And here they are, cruising in a Toyota Prius earlier this summer, making menacing raps about the Whole Foods parking lot:

Jessica Frech, extolling the virtues of Hyundai’s warranty program:

And here’s her hit, a tribute (or something) to the “People of Walmart”:

Having gained market share on Toyota Motor Corp. and being not far from passing Honda Motor Co. in the U.S. in sales, the scrappy underdog is turning a bit more into the playground bully.

Case in point: Toyota was going for the maximum splash in revealing its new Camry today at locations in Los Angeles, Dearborn, Mich., Georgetown, Ky. and New York. And they promoted they would show the vehicle early through Twitter. Too bad Nissan had purchased the top search term “Camry” for Twitter and when you search for that word, the first tweet that appears is something from the Nissan twitter feed.

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Facebook is a big part of that, but as the seventh largest developer on the platform, and with only 12 percent as many active monthly users as Zynga, it has a long way to go.

It believes the solution is leaning on its deep catalog of brands — something Zynga and many others can’t compete with. So far, it’s launched Monopoly Millionaires, FIFA Superstars and Scrabble.

The next one, officially launching today, is The Sims Social.

Sims Social is a brand with a lot of history. It’s been played by 140 million fans in 22 languages in 60 countries around the world. To date, it has been available on the PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Wii and mobile.

Electronic Arts originally unveiled the game at E3 in June. To put the social game in context, I wrote at the time:

One of the most anticipated launches of the year is EA’s Battlefield 3, which is expected to go head to head with the seemingly unstoppable Call of Duty franchise. But at the company’s eardrum-splitting press conference in downtown Los Angeles, it also showed off The Sims, which is reflective of a wider trend in the industry to embrace other platforms.

With the launch of Sims on Facebook, EA is promising that your social life will never be the same. Given the game has the potential to create some very awkward moments with your friends and partners, that’s hardly an overstatement.

Players will be presented with challenges, such as forming romantic relationships, flirting, joking and getting married. They can build dream homes, take showers together, or play pranks or achieve goals, such as having 10 girls in the hot tub at the same time.

At E3, I wrote: “Who needs Battlefield 3 when you can begin World War 3 among your friends?”

There’s no requirement to “marry” your real-life wife or husband, or boyfriend or girlfriend, which could cause all sorts of real-life sparks to fly. If you can imagine slapping your husband (or the other woman) after reading about his latest accomplishments in his news feed, don’t worry, you can do that in the game, too.

EA is hoping the high intensity situations will lead to explosive growth.

The game, which is available in five languages, was technically launched today, but has been around in beta for awhile. It won the 2011 Best Browser Game Award at Gamescom in Germany this week, and it topped this week’s list of fastest-growing games by daily active users, according to InsideSocialGames.com. It has roughly 1.45 million daily active users on Facebook, gaining 2,287 percent compared to last week.

Sims Social will be free to play and will monetize both through virtual goods and in-game advertising, such as items from Dr Pepper, Dunkin’ Donuts and Toyota that can provide extra boosts and benefits when players need them.

This is not the first time the company has brought the PC game and console title to the Internet, but last time it failed.

John Buchanan, VP of Marketing at EA Play, said it’s been more than five years since that experiment and that this time they put in the time and energy to build something that both Sims fans and newcomers can enjoy.

“It is an incredibly exciting time for us. You have the No. 1 PC franchise and the No. 1 social network. It’s really exciting. It’s a game that is going to revolutionize social gaming and the Sims,” he said.

To build this game, EA’s Play Label teamed up with Playfish, its social games division. This marks the first time for a massive collaboration between the two groups, said CJ Prober, VP of publishing at Playfish.

“We used everything that the Sims team knows about the game for the past 10 years, and what works and what the fans love, and Playfish brought everything it knows about social gaming. It was a truly collaborative effort.”

Prober said development doesn’t stop today. Up next will be a mobile component that will allow users to stay in touch with their Facebook experiences while on the go.

That’s a good idea. That way, you can get out of the hot tub quickly before you get into real hot water.

I can tell you that Windows Azure is going to make the telematics systems in the next generation of Toyota cars smarter. And I also know that this unit of Microsoft has been in a state of management flux recently. Amitabh Srivastava, the Microsoft Distinguished Fellow, who in 2006 took over a project then known only as Red Dog that went on to become Azure, left the company in February.

It’s no secret that, like so many other companies, Microsoft has some big plans for cloud services. It recently disclosed that it plans to spend more than $8 billion in research and development funds on its cloud strategy.

On a recent visit to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, I got a chance to sit down with Doug Hauger, Microsoft’s general manager of Windows Azure. And my first question was really really basic.

NewEnterprise: Doug, there’s so much happening in the cloud computing space these days, and most of the time when people think of cloud services they think of Amazon Web Services. And if they mention Windows Azure, they think, well, that’s Microsoft’s answer to Amazon. But you describe Azure as more of a platform-as-a-service. Can you walk me through the differences?

Hauger: Windows Azure started about five years ago. At that point it started because the company, as with all service providers, was facing some challenges on providing large, scalable, manageable services, not just to consumers, but to businesses that could dynamically scale, and that we could innovate on quickly, and bring out new features. Originally it was meant to be a platform we would use internally for services that we would then deliver out to customers. We quickly realized that we should sell it to partners and customers, and allow them to build on it as a platform.

There are fundamental differences between infrastructure as a service and what we did as platform as a service. It’s different in key ways from, say, what Amazon does with EC2 and S3 or VMWare being implemented in a data center. Our starting point for the design was to see the data center as a unit. That means the networking structure, the load-balancers, the power management, and so on–rather than in infrastructure as a service, you start from an individual server and move up.

If you allocate a service into Windows Azure and say you want it available 100 percent of the time, we will allocate it across multiple upgrade domains and physical power domains in such a way so that if any individual rack goes down or if we’re upgrading the operating system, there’s no interruption in service. That’s just a fundamentally different starting point, with an individual server and moving up. And the way that we do that is we have built out an abstraction layer of APIs that let you write to a set of services, storage services, computer services, networking services, et cetera. As a developer you can write to the service, and give us your application, and it just gets provisioned through what we call a fabric controller, that controls the data center, and also across multiple data centers. That was a design point. That’s how we allow people to write services that can scale and won’t fail and will be available all the time.

The conversation about infrastructure as a service typically starts at cost savings. You go see a customer and they say they want to cut their IT budget and outsource their IT, and so they start there. Platform as a service you start at the cost savings, but very quickly you see 10, 20 or 30 percent cost savings. But the conversation quickly turns to the innovation life cycle that they can get out of the platform. It’s much faster than you can at infrastructure as a service.

The big point that everyone gets about the cloud is that they can use it to save money, but then they quickly start asking what more can they do with the cloud. Are you seeing the same thing?

Yes, exactly. In the enterprise, they’re starting to turn the crank on innovation. I talk to customers who are turning things around in six weeks or a month whereas before they would six months or a year. I actually just talked to a customer the other day, and they said their developers were spending 40 to 50 percent of their time managing services and they couldn’t use that time writing software which was their job. When they moved to a platform as a service, they didn’t have to worry about that anymore. We’re seeing this happening in the enterprise where people are doing this for internal development and on services they’re building for their customers.

One example, Daimler just did their new version of the smart car. They wanted a service so you can check the status of your car when its charging from your smart phone, locate it, et cetera. They turned it around in a couple of weeks on Azure and launched it at the same time as the car launched.

We’re also seeing small players compete at the enterprise level. There’s a small company called Margin Pro and they do mortgage analysis and risk assessment on mortgages. Basically it’s a couple of economists and developers. They wrote the software on Windows Azure, and now they have 70 banks around the world, tens of millions of dollars in revenue, and they are competing with some of the biggest financial services companies in the world because of this back-end infrastructure data center they can use to deliver their results to their customers.

But do you have customers who run standard apps on it too?

Many standard applications have some level of customization, and so we’re seeing a lot of hybrid applications, where customers are extending them into Azure. We have a case with Coca-Cola Enterprises which has a back-end order-processing app that they’ve extended into Azure. And what they wanted to do was get more reach and more agility for the front-end. So they built a secure connection between their data center and Windows Azure and then extended the application out to their partners and customers, essentially people like Domino’s Pizza who order Coca Cola products. We’re seeing a lot of these cases of existing applications being extended like that.

We’re also seeing companies using the high performance computing workload. One example is a company called Greenbutton, which has done a high performance scheduling and billing system on Azure. Another is Pixar, which has an application called RenderMan, which does rendering. Most large animation houses have their own clusters they do this rendering on. Pixar wanted to open up a market for smaller animation houses, little Pixars if you will. They’re working with Greenbutton to embed their technology into RenderMan. They can farm their rendering out to Azure and be billed on a usage basis. That’s a case where you have a large company and a smaller one working together and leveraging the power of the cloud to open up a whole new marketplace where they can be competitive. We call it the democratization of IT.

At what point is the customers’ thinking right now? Are they still at that point where they want to see how much money they can save by moving things that are on-premise to the cloud or are they past that by now?

I would say there’s three buckets of customers. I’ve been in this role for three years and the conversations have evolved in some interesting ways. Three years ago I was telling people they should be adopters and get on board with this platform early. They all said to come back and talk to them in five years. Then about two years ago, the majority of customers were in the first bucket, interested in wanting to save money but they weren’t interested in doing any new innovation. And then there were a few willing to innovate a bit by extending their applications into the cloud. Today I would say many, but not the majority yet, but a lot of them say they get the cloud, they get the cost savings, and now they want to drive the innovation life cycle faster. And there is a growing percentage who are willing to do something completely different and compete in a new way and build a brand new business. It’s been exciting to see that.

What’s been really exciting has been seeing mid-sized companies realizing they can use the cloud to give them an advantage to innovate faster and compete against really big companies. So that is sort of the landscape. Interestingly, I’ve been seeing a lot more adoption among the financial services companies than I had anticipated.

Aren’t they the ones who are supposed to be the most conservative when it comes to IT? I mean, they’re aggressive on performance, but obsessed with security and so skeptical of using the cloud because they don’t want to let their data leave their hands.

Exactly. But think about financial services. They’ve been in cloud computing forever, but it’s just been running on their own proprietary clouds. And so they are very good about understanding their application portfolio, and what can run in a public cloud, what has to stay in a private cloud, and how they can span those clouds. You can basically say you want to do risk assessment on portfolios, you anonymize the data, and you run it on the public cloud, you do all the analytics, you bring it back on-premise and then you deliver it to your customer. Having that kind of mentality in that industry allows them to move very quickly.

Also, manufacturing is moving and adopting the cloud faster than I would have guessed. And interestingly enough, government–not so much federal, because there’s so many certification requirements–but state and local governments are embracing the cloud because of the economic situation, and these are not just governments within the U.S. In Australia and Western Europe, we’re seeing governments adopting and building out applications so they can get services out to their citizens.

So what’s keeping you up at night? What makes you worry?

There’s a few things I think about. While we drive customers to a very fast innovation life cycle, we need to stay ahead of that innovation life cycle ourselves. We’ve done a pretty good job with that. One example, when we first released in beta a few years ago, we had .NET but we didn’t have PHP or Java. We got feedback immediately, almost on the first day, that customers wanted those and right away. And so we turned it around and added those within three months. Our ability to turn the crank pretty quickly is there. And that is something that in the software industry and specifically Microsoft, we have to make sure we make this turn toward service delivery, where we have to innovate quickly so you can deliver services. I think we’re doing a good job, but it’s something top of mind for me.

What are they asking for now? Is there something new the customers want that they don’t have?

They’re asking for continued investment in Java. We have it now, but making it a truly first class citizen, which is what we’re focused on delivering. We also need to keep our ear to the ground around things like application frameworks, extending the modeling capabilities in Visual Studio and things like that. It’s just a matter of thinking about the developer. We need to understand what they want, that’s what we’re here for.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer are holding a joint press conference at 1 pm PT today, and Mobilized hears that the new deal is a fairly broad pact covering a couple of different areas of Microsoft’s business.

There are certainly plenty of areas of potential collaboration. Microsoft’s Windows Auto software is used to power entertainment and navigation in a number of cars from Ford, Kia and others.

Reports also suggest there will be joint work on energy efficiency, and Microsoft has been signing up lots of big companies for its various cloud computing efforts.

Update: The two companies have issued a press release outlining the deal.

Toyota will use Windows Azure to power a new generation of in-car systems, known in the industry as telematics.

The two sides are also playing up the energy efficiency piece of the news, noting that the electronic systems can be used to monitor energy use, in addition to traditional tasks like navigation and entertainment. As part of the deal, the companies are making a $12 million investment in a Toyota subsidiary that offers digital information systems to its car owners.

Azure-based systems are due to start showing up in Toyota electric and hybrid cars next year, with an aim to have a global system up and running by 2015.

1:03 p.m. PT: The companies have started their press conference. Toyoda kicks things off by noting that he debated going to Redmond for the event in the wake of the massive earthquake. However, he said that after visiting some of the hardest-hit areas, he concluded the best thing he could do is to “provide hope and steady economic progress.”

“So, I am here,” Toyoda said.

As for the joint efforts, Toyoda spoke about an opportunity to improve in-car electronics as well provide “smart grid” services that can help ease the load of electric vehicles.

1:06 p.m.: Ballmer also takes a moment to acknowledge the quake and note Microsoft’s contributions to the recovery effort before diving into the specifics of the deal.

The first incarnation of the service will show up starting next year on hybrids and plug-in electrics. Examples of the possibilities, Ballmer said, are that car owners will be able to use their PC to turn on heat or air-conditioning while the car is charging or use a smartphone to remotely check maintenance information.

Ballmer talks about it as the ultimate in mobile computing and noted the need for information, given that many people spend a significant amount of their time in their car.

1:17 p.m.: Asked why the companies are starting with hybrids and electric vehicles, Ballmer said the companies are trying to “shoot ahead” of where the business is today, adding that technology will be needed to help manage power consumption, in addition to traditional navigation and entertainment products.

It’s still a little vague how much of what the companies are doing initially is for in-car electronics as compared to cloud-based services that are accessed via a PC or phone. I’ve asked about this, so hopefully we will get some clarity.

1:29 p.m.: Ballmer notes that the deal is, to some degree, about information accessed in the car, but adds it is also about information getting to and from the car to the cloud and other devices.

Japan in 2010 accounted for 35 percent–or $11 billion worth–of the $31.5 billion global market for automotive infotainment electronics, iSuppli says. On top of that, Japan is responsible for about one-third–$7.3 billion–of the $23 billion market for chips used in cars overall. Aside from chips, Japanese companies produce LCD panels and optical sensors used to make in-car systems.

ISuppli says Renesas Electronics, Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor and Fujitsu, all of which supply components to the auto industry, have all been affected by shipping problems and difficulty in obtaining raw materials. The problems could last weeks or months.

Problems like this aren’t just hitting infotainment systems. As The Wall Street Journal reported today, shortages of a single electronic part made by Hitachi Automotive that measures airflow in car engines have forced companies like General Motors, Toyota and PSA Peugeot-Citroën to cut their output at auto plants in the U.S. and Europe. The plant that makes the component is located to the north of Tokyo and has been shut down. Hitachi makes about 60 percent of the world’s supply for this type of part. The Journal said Toyota on Wednesday warned employees to expect a production halt at some plants in the U.S. and Canada.

Meanwhile, Japanese automakers have stopped production at several plants in order to conserve electricity following the loss of generating power from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. There has been a 10 percent reduction in electrical capacity, iSuppli says. Additionally, companies like BMW, Volkswagen, Continental and Bosch have removed their expatriate employees from Japan.

Separately, Dow Jones reported yesterday that ZTE Corp., a Chinese maker of networking gear, is suffering quake-related supply problems. A company exec said it expects the problems to last as long as six months.

For its new compact Lexus, Toyota Motor Corp. is enlisting people with a strong following on Twitter and other social media to create buzz around its products.

Its new campaign includes online videos that show actress and comedian Whitney Cummings interviewing an array of social-media heavyweights as they take the Lexus CT 200h for a spin around their hometowns. The stars of the campaign include Baratunde Thurston, Web editor of satire website the Onion; Brian Solis, a marketing guru and social-media expert; and Richard Quitevis, or DJ Qbert, a well-known disc jockey.

“If we have people that are active in social media, then they can bring followers with them,” says Dave Nordstrom, Lexus’s vice president of marketing.

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These come from mobile ad start-up Medialets, which put together a highlight reel at my request. The video doesn’t quite do these things justice, because you really have to see them on Apple’s tablet to appreciate them. But take a look, anyway–it’s probably best if you view these in full-screen mode–and I’ll try to tease them out for you afterward:

Here’s what you just saw:

• FedEx ad, designed for Newsweek app.
• Visa ad, designed for NPR app with help from AKQA, Visa’s regular digital agency. Features e-commerce possibilities, without leaving the app, via Fandango.com and Broadway.com
• Toyota Prius ad, designed for Weather Channel Max app; allows users to “draw” images incorporated into video.

Again, the market for this stuff is so new that shops like Medialets are essentially starting from scratch each time they put together a tablet ad. And that means there’s no reason for these things not to be interesting–you’ve never seen them before.

But eventually some of this stuff will become more standardized, just as most Web ads are. And that will make it harder to stand out.

So SVnetwork has a proposition for you: Take a quick break from the virtual farming game, click through this Toyota ad and you’ll get free credits to buy more sheep. Or whatever.

If this sounds familiar, there’s a good reason: It’s similar to the “offers” programs that generated so much controversy for Farmville publisher Zynga last year.

But there’s a big difference here: Consumers aren’t asked to sign up for anything more binding than a Facebook fan page. And generally, SVnetwork’s advertisers are happy if surfers just agree to soak up some brand advertising.

SVnetwork has done 100 campaigns like this, for big advertisers like Apple (AAPL), Disney (DIS) and Microsoft (MSFT)–that’s an example of a Bing campaign above. And CEO Jay Samit, who came to the start-up after stints in the digital divisions of Sony (SNE) and EMI Music, thinks the company is onto something. It might be.

Right now, the two big display ad strategies on the Web are:

1. Target Web surfers by tracking their online behavior, and hope that doesn’t freak them out too much, and/or…
2. Run ads at ever-increasing sizes–blotting out the whole page, if you can get away with it–and hope that doesn’t annoy them too much.

SVnetwork’s seems like a pretty good compromise: Consumers opt in, and they know they’re getting a reward at the end. They might even generate warm feelings for the advertiser, and/or decide to share the ad with their pals via Facebook.

Zynga still runs offers, by the way, though it insists it has become very picky about the advertisers it works with, and that the offer dollars make up a small slice of its revenue.

And people familiar with the company say that offers generate more money for the game company than SVnetwork’s spots do. Advertisers pay something in the $0.50 to $1 range for each user who clicks through, while a Netflix (NFLX) may still pay Zynga north of $20 for each successful offer. But it’s possible that the ads will eclipse offers down the line.

A few notes:

• Toyota has been doing variations on this theme all year, including a Super Bowl spot. You can see them all on the “Channel” page Toyota has set up on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. But none of them have caught on like this clip.
• If director Jody Hill’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s one of the guys behind the excellent Eastbound & Down. If you haven’t seen it, you should. (Saatchi & Saatchi gets credit for the whole thing).
• So here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure I’m at the bull’s-eye center of the target demo for this one. And it makes me feel warm about Toyota (TM), unintended acceleration or no. But I’m still not buying a minivan. Yet.

Toyota (TM) is considering close NUMMI, a Fremont, California vehicle-assembly plant that it has been operating jointly with General Motors. The revamped GM has decided to pull out of the venture, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (ergo, NUMMI) and now Toyota may close the doors on the operation, which employs 4,600 people.

“We need to determine whether it can be economically feasible to contract with NUMMI without GM,” Toyota said in a statement, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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With help from advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, the car maker is working with Dictionary.com for ads targeted to the definitions of words such as “sustainability,” “green” and “moonroof.” Those keyword-based ads launched last week, but Prius also took over the online dictionary’s home page Wednesday and Thursday, with another two-day takeover planned for July. Dictionary.com has also included Prius ads in its word-of-the-day emails, which reach 1.3 million subscribers.

Doug Frisbie, Toyota’s national media manager, said the company was active with search engines before (and this campaign ties with partnerships with MSN (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO), as well), but never before a dictionary site.

The objective of the Prius campaign is to integrate the ads with Dictionary.com content — to “enhance, rather than interrupt,” he said.

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Car companies cut their ad spending by 10 percent, to $6.1 billion, through the first half of the year, according to Nielsen’s ad tracking service. That confirms anecdotal evidence media companies have been offering up throughout the year, and it means that the numbers for the second half of the year–when the economy really collapsed–are going to be brutal.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why everyone–from Time Warner’s Time Inc. (TWX) to GE’s (GE) NBC to every Web start-up you can think of–is looking at dwindling ad revenue for the foreseeable future.

And yes, you can point your finger most accusingly at Detroit, if that makes you feel better: While some imports, like Toyota (TM) and Honda (HMC), actually kept spending steady or increased it, the formerly Big 3 all made big cuts. General Motors (GM), the country’s biggest auto ad buyer, dropped spending six percent; Ford (F) and Chrysler dropped 22 percent each.

MediaPost has the full gory details.

[Image Credit: Hauke Sandhaus]

Even as the Justice Department drills down on the deal (along with Canada now), a very helpful Google PR guy wrote to BoomTown in an email:

“The site attempts to answer questions that people have raised about the deal, address the agreement’s impact on advertisers and on competition, and serve as an information clearinghouse for journalists as well. … We’ll be updating the site regularly too, so you can use it as a one-stop shop for information about the agreement.”

Phew!

I, for one, am glad to learn that the outsourcing deal is NOT a merger (page 10) and that Toyota provides hybrid engine technology for Ford (Page 11).

But, curiously, the site touts the deal by using a woefully-out-of-context quote from a piece I did last week.

While I have been very much against the deal since it was announced, I did a post last week–in the interests of fairness–in which I featured the best arguments (not mine!) as to why the deal would probably not get blocked by the Justice Department.

Google used a quote from the piece on its site, but it is misleading (see the quote on the page below; click on the image to make it larger). [UPDATE: Google has thankfully removed my fake blurb, as seen below.]

I did write in a post on Sept. 18:

Thus, there’s not a whole lot for the Justice Department to hang a case on, in contrast to its case against Microsoft, which landed in court because of bullying behavior that actually took place before the case was waged.”

But, in the piece, I was clearly paraphrasing the reasoning of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) and in no way was it my opinion of the deal.

Saying there’s a chance Yahoogle will not get stopped by regulators is a bit different from saying I think this is a good thing.

I do NOT think it is a good thing.

In fact, here’s what I said in a piece the day before:

Thus, BoomTown is both gobsmacked and a bit in awe that [Google CEO Eric] Schmidt–now sitting atop the high-tech pig pile as CEO of the powerful search giant, Google–can, with a straight face, make the argument that everyone is wrong to be nervous about its deal with Yahoo to serve some of its search and text advertising, even though the pair control more than 80 percent of the search market.

Because while Google displays none of the bullying tactics of Microsoft (MSFT) in its glory days–think of it more like a giant that could accidentally squash all us little people with its big dumb feet–the worries about it amassing too much power are well-founded.”

And here’s what I wrote back in April:

Still, you have to almost admire the chutzpah of the search giant in making this move, if the sheer and unadulterated arrogance of it wasn’t so distracting.

Because, while Google has almost none of the obvious menacing aggression that characterized Microsoft when it thoroughly dominated tech (although all those beach bikes on its campus inexplicably creep me out a little bit), the company still cannot be allowed to have a monopolistic share of the market.

It is bad for advertisers, it is bad for consumers, it is bad for innovation, no matter how well-intentioned Google is.”

Somehow, neither of these two-thumbs-down quotes made it onto the Yahoogle-rocks site.

I feel like one of those misquoted movie critics in newspaper ads! (“Go…see…it…quick!!!,” when the entire quote was “Go home before you see even a second of it or you will be sick quick!!!”)

In any case, here are the 17 pages of slides from the Yahoogle site, embedded below:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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