Would you like chicken or steak with your Allegra?

Just when you think there's nowhere else for advertising to go, those wily marketers always find another blank surface to plaster with an ad. The latest example of marketing run amok: A pharmaceutical company is serving up prescription-drug propaganda on airline food trays, right alongside the plastic-wrapped silverware and lukewarm mystery meat.

On a Delta flight from Cincinnati to San Francisco yesterday, I found a coupon offering me $10 off Allegra, the prescription allergy medicine, wedged on the tray next to the butter-substitute and salt and pepper packets. Never mind that Allegra is a prescription medicine, the coupon listed an 800 number I could call to claim my rebate. Maybe the word about the horrendous pollen counts in the Bay Area has made it to the Midwest. Quick: Grab the air phone and call in your emergency prescription before the plane lands!

The food-tray coupon may be original, but it's an odd marketing strategy for the drug's manufacturer, Aventis. First of all, there's the timing issue. Along with Schering-Plough and Pfizer, the makers of allergy medicines Claritin and Zyrtec, Aventis is currently locked in a battle with the Food and Drug Administration to keep their lucrative allergy potions from being sold over the counter. Apparently, they'll do anything to stimulate demand -- even on your dinner tray -- but the drug companies still want to keep red-eyed and sniffling allergy-sufferers from paying the lower over-the-counter prices for their allergy meds. Still, captive audience or not, what could be worse for a product than being associated with coach airline food? -- Katharine Mieszkowski [11:55 a.m. PDT, May 21, 2001]

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Students for a Drug-Free White House to Bush: Fess up!

"Just Say Blow!": That's the name of the site where an online petition chides the president for his hypocrisy on the drug war.

Students for a Drug-Free White House want President Bush to come clean about his own drug history -- or stop asking students who are applying for federal financial aid about theirs. The petition reads: "President Bush, if you deny federal funds to students who won't talk about their drug histories, it's only fair that you forego your federal salary until you are willing to come clean with your own drug past."

The Bush administration has adopted a hard line on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, which asks students if they've been arrested for drug possession or dealing. Under the Clinton administration, if a student left the answer to that question blank on the form, he or she could still receive aid. These days, the student would be ineligible.

As for the "students" behind the online petition drive, which will begin in earnest next Tuesday, they're actually not students. But that's just academic.

"Just Say Blow" is only the latest in a history of activist hijinks for John Hlinko, 34, a laid-off dot-commer in Oakland, Calif. Until March, Hlinko was a "marketing evangelist" for Third Voice, the much-hyped, now defunct, Web communications tool. He and his friend Jesse Green, 34, who also was laid off from Third Voice, created the site.

Hlinko points out that the issue does apply to him, since right now he's pondering a return to grad school to get a Ph.D. in political science, and will apply for financial aid to do so. But really, he says, it's just a matter of common sense. "Kids who have a drug record and want to go to college, are those the kids that you want to keep from going to college? Even if you are a compassionate conservative who has no compassion, it's dumb public policy. I thought it might lend itself to satire, because it was satire already."

Among Hlinko's other activist stunts: At the end of March, he traveled to Washington on behalf of MoveOn.org to deliver petitions about a campaign finance bill. Since Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had once said that Americans care as much about campaign finance reform as they do about static cling, Hlinko showed up in the Senator's office with 30,000 petitions calling for campaign finance reform and 100 sheets of Bounce, and wearing a static cling suit -- that's a suit with socks, underwear and bras taped all over it. When he returned to San Francisco, he found that his work voicemail had been disconnected: Third Voice closed down two days later.

Since the layoff, Hlinko has not been wasting time slacking. With his newfound free time, he's helped the U.C. Berkeley student group Students for Fair Taxes to organize a campus protest against the Bush tax cut and put together a mock fundraiser for "The Dick Cheney Fund," "an activist organization dedicated to bringing the desperate plight of the multi-millionaire to the attention of the American public."

As for the "Just Say Blow" project, it's not about the drugs, Hlinko swears up and down. It's about principle: "To be honest, we don't really care if the President did some drugs 30 years ago, but if he's going to be hypocritical today, that we care about." -- Katharine Mieszkowski [5:25 p.m. PDT, May 17, 2001]

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Laid off? Clean out your closet

"Wardrobe.org says you can still help out women who don't have a home or the clothes to wear for getting a job. Wardrobe.org is a group of five women who get suits donated to women so they can find jobs, so now is the time to donate those suits you're not wearing and are going out of style."

-- Gracenet founder Sylvia Paull, suggesting one thing that jobless dot-commers and techies can do during this "market menopause," as she calls it, in an e-mail to the Bay Area group's members.

And why not? After all, you don't have much use for those Donna Karan and Anne Klein blazers these days do you? What could be more cathartic than purging your closets of all that cube-wear? -- Katharine Mieszkowski [3:05 p.m. PDT, May 16, 2001]

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Flattery like this will get you everywhere

Writing on the Web, we're used to being flamed with colorful and gratifying names like: "beer-swilling, ignorant, inbred hillbillies" or "some outdated, leftist, probably divorced or never married cliché from San Francisco who fancies herself an intellectual or 'literary' personage because she read the entire 'diversity' book catalog at whatever burnt-out, formerly great -- now leftist-controlled and declining -- university she went to." That kind of thing.

But sometimes, when the ire in our mailbox becomes too bitter a pill to take alone, we turn to the Web for a little bit of sunshine at usoFyne.

UsoFyne is a self-proclaimed "prop-giving, flattery-delivering service administered free of charge." Basically, give this site your e-mail address, and they send you a note blowing smoke up your ass in the most extravagant way. The nice thing is that the slavishly complimentary e-mail doesn't arrive until a few days later. By then, you've forgotten that you've engaged in this masturbatory pursuit of praise -- until you get a message saying something like:

"Katharine the mother fucking GREAT is more like it, you dreamsicle of a female specimen! Trees creak and groan as you pass, just so they can get a little closer to that incredibly hot ass of yours. Scholars find themselves daydreaming of your infinitely powerful mind as they form their treatises on life, love and obscure philosophical texts. We here at usoFyne spill our Bloody Marys on our flip flops cause we get so excited when your name comes up at our round table discussions in the usoFyne solarium!" And so on.

It's just nice to know that someone out there on the Web is dedicated to dishing out the love with just as much fervid, florid prose as the droves of e-mail critics. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [5:05 p.m. PDT, May 15, 2001]

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You can't buy this kind of advertising

There is the product placement that companies shell out millions of dollars to get, and then there is the product placement that results from nothing but sheer serendipity alone.

How else to explain this latest advertising coup: On Tuesday, CNN.com inadvertently let one of its advertisers weigh in on a runaway-train fiasco, courtesy of a well-placed advertisement in the left-hand column. While the site's main story describes the narrow escape of a runaway train in Findlay, Ohio, a corporate sponsor offers its own condolences.

"It's hard to stop a Trane" reads the link to the Trane Company, "a worldwide leader for indoor comfort systems for your home and business."

Amen! Just ask the railway worker who took a heroic leap aboard the moving freight train -- a train full of flammable materials -- as it hurtled towards certain calamity after its operator suffered some kind of (as yet undetermined) medical emergency.

On this point, we are all in agreement: It's hard to stop a train. And even harder to score this kind of marketing. -- Amy Standen [3:05 p.m. PDT, May 15, 2001]

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