Red Cross Hearing Test Harnesses Senses for Meaningful Message

How does your hearing compare to others in your age group? Find out in this quick hearing exam, sponsored by the Red Cross and Oslo Health.

You might learn something about captivating audiences to broadcast a message they'd normally ignore. That's what we walked away with.

Thanks Shedwa for pointing it out.

Pissed-Off Panda Invades Copenhagen for Climate Conference

To get the Danes all peppy about the 2009 international climate conference in Copenhagen, We Love People stenciled images of a burning panda on the streets. Also, watch while a giant projection of a panda in flames races across the Copenhagen cityscape.

We have seen such magic before.

The agency told us the "burning panda" imagery -- put together for WWF -- represents a panda that is angry about global warming. Aww. We love furry, fat and scowly things.

Just because we feel like it, here are some random panda facts from a website that looks like it was made in the early content days of dot-com.

Animated Courtney Cox Dishes on Celebrities in 'Dirt' Promos

To help kick of Courtney's Cox' second season of Dirt on FX, recently launched design and production company Arsenal created six animated "vignettes of Hollywood stars and celebutaunts caught in the act of wild, unbecoming behavior." Each vignette is finished off with witty commentary from Courtney Cox.

There's the all too common crotch shot, the mug shot, the booty shot, the herpes/STD/overdose and more. All six do a nice job capturing Hollywood's...um...dirt, as it were.

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Divinity Metrics Measures Brands' Online Video Presence

Divinity Metrics has put together a chart measuring the top 20 brands in online video. It will be updated every week. At first we were gonna compare it to the AdAge Power 150, a measuring stick for the top media and marketing blogs, but it's not really like that. It's more like the Dow Jones.

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Is There a Heaven for iPods? ... No.

This is sort of neat. Watch the sped-up drama of your consumption patterns on The Story of Stuff. Very rarely have we been able to sit still for 20 minutes to listen to something educational. Maybe it's narrator Annie Leonard's exciting grade school reading voice ... or the animated stick figures.

Anyway, this is useful information to know if you're an avid consumer of All Things Hype and Now. Everybody with an iPod -- listen up!

Scrimpers, Working Class Heroes Valorized in Fifth Third Ad Campaign

Here's an ad about a middle-aged paperboy working to get braces for his daughter. And here's one about a white collar cog who drives his college beater so he and his pregnant wife can save for their baby.

These spots are part of an ad campaign for Fifth Third Bank called "The Things We Do for Dreams," produced by Anonymous Content for agency OLSON.

We like it. Swimming upstream against a dismal economy, it's nice to see a bank put an optimistic spin on the everyday struggle -- illuminating the decisions we've had to make, and watch our parents make -- rather than distracting us with gimmicky comic relief.

It lends the sense that Fifth Third understands what it's like to do things that aren't fun out of a sense of hope. That's nice. And strangely rare.

Lettuce, Peaches and Now Beer Bottles Create Outdoor Advertising

Leo Burnett gave us the lettuce garden billboard. Ella Bache skincare gave us a giant "naked" lady made out of peaches in Sydney's First Fleet Park. Now, Carlsberg beer has given us a billboard made out of beer bottles to introduce its new, yes, bottle.

We wonder who got to drink all the beer before all those bottles went up. Perhaps the creators of the board, Duval Guillaume in Antwerp could let us know.

YouIntern Pairs Co-Eds with Agencies

To drum up some business, YouIntern -- which launched in February -- is giving a $10 iTunes gift card away to one lucky person who registers on the site.

YouIntern is where ad students and creativity-starved agency execs can find one another. (Just ... not in the craigslist hook-up sort of way.) We love its simple but totally self-entitled "Freedom from coffee and copies" manifesto.

Agencies can post internships and give advice, like the CSO of StrawberryFrog does here. And internships can be rated. Modernista, for example, scored a 4.4 out of five.

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Leo Burnett Combats Cancer with Man Hair

Nothing says "manly" like a manly manly mustache. So why not use its follicle-rich power to fight prostate cancer, that most castrating of man-diseases? That's what Leo Burnett did.

For the month of what came to be called "Movember" ("mo" being slang for "mustache" in Australia), employees at Leo Burnett, Chicago grew mustaches to raise money for prostate cancer research. Part of the game was competing with the Australia office. (Witness the hijinks for yourself.)

Chicago, which beat the Aussies in both donation and 'stache style, raised $7000 for the cause. For an additional $10 donation, employees were offered a signed Men of Movember 2008 calendar.

Guess what! Now you can have one too. And if anybody asks why a calendar of hairy strangers is hanging over the water cooler, just tell them you helped fight cancer.

Only pray they don't ask what one has to do with the other. Out loud and to somebody who's probably gunning for your cubicle, telling this story is strangely tiring.

Icons Transcend Time in Converse Sneaks

To celebrate 100 years in footwear, Converse is welding new icons to old ones in a campaign called "Connectivity."

According to Complex, "cultural heroes" like James Dean, Hunter S. Thompson and Sid Viscious will fuse feet (neat touch!) with Common, Dwyane Wade and Billie Joe Armstrong. Sort of like paper dolls.

See more here.

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