If your agency has a little extra desk space and would like to give it a higher purpose than storing empty binders, you might be interested in the Free Desk Here project. The international effort, created by the London-based Open Studio Club, provides aspiring creative professionals with free workspace at willing agencies. The squatter creatives do their own work, not agency projects. The goal is to give up-and-coming talent the facilities, tools and camaraderie to create professional-caliber work. Here are the rules:

    Desks are 100 percent free. There's no charge.
    Guests are there to work on their own projects, not the agency's work.
    Agencies can end things at any point.
    Wifi and other facilities like the kitchen, toilet and windows are included.
    The desk is available only during agency hours.
    Guests should not invite anyone into the agency.
    Meeting rooms are off limits to guests.
    Use of stationery, printers, telephones, etc., are not included.
    Guests might be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement.
    Guests shouldn't play their own music.
    Guests should respect the studio culture.
    Guests should not remove anything from the studio.
    Guest might be asked to meet the agency before being offered the desk.
    Guests should be open to share ideas and talk about their work.
    Guests should be actively working on a project and attend the agency daily.
    The free desk is not a short cut to getting a job at the agency.

Interested in offering up space or browsing for a desk to jockey? Check out the Free Desk Here website for details and photos of participating shops.

Piss off, dancing Shetland pony and Mr. Wolfdog. This is the Year of the Goat in advertising. Tyler, The Creator, the leader of hip-hop collective Odd Future, directs and provides the raspy voice of Felicia the Goat in this 30-second slice of crazed commercial perfection for Mountain Dew. A waitress brings Felicia a bottle of the beverage, which the beast rejects, and hooves start flying as the server screams in terror, "Ooh, you're a nasty goat!" (I usually go hyper and pummel the waitstaff after drinking the stuff.) Felicia ultimately imbibes, trips out, demands more, and the comic attack intensifies. We're told the story will continue, which is great, because this insanity fits the brand's quirky personality. I can't wait for the sequel. Maybe they'll serve Felicia soda in a can and let her chew the scenery in a whole new way. Via Co.Create.

The taxicabs in Denver are a bit hornier than usual, and it's all science's fault. Carmichael Lynch put ornamental mammoth tusks on a fleet of cabs to drum up attention for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's "Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age" exhibit. The cool thing about this idea is that when the exhibit ends, they can keep the tusks and do cab jousts for charity.

Sure, Japanese ads are crazy. But they rarely sink (or is that rise?) to the level of satanic-cult-forcing-Furbies-to-cannibalize-themselves crazy. Sadly, the "Creepy Japanese Furby Commercial" below isn't real. It's a parody by YouTube editing wizard Mike Diva. But it's still worth a watch—and worth a browse of the YouTube comments, where many Japanophiles seem so excited about the soundtrack from animated siren Hatsune Miku that they don't seem to notice (or maybe care) when the ad segues into an Eli Roth film.

Revenge billboards are getting to be a trend. Expensive but emotionally satisfying, they're great for anything from declaring spousal inadequacies to calling out cheaters. This one, in Greensboro, N.C., goes the extra mile by spoofing MasterCard's "Priceless" campaign. It reads: "Michael – GPS tracker - $250, Nikon camera with zoom lens - $1600, Catching my LYING HUSBAND and buying this billboard with our investment account - Priceless. Tell Jessica you're moving in! – Jennifer." Chad Tucker of Fox 8 News broke this story. Hopefully, he can track down Jennifer and film the fisticuffs we're all imagining.

Neat Dude Collective's "Yet Another Fucking Music Festival" parody poster is as observant as it is snarky, so clearly they've got some folks who've been to Bonnaroo and Coachella more than a few times. It's nice to see them point out "2 Dudes & a MacBook," because for a while I thought I was the only person who noticed that becoming more of a thing, although "Cute Girl With a Guitar and a Sundress" is slowly ceding ground to "Cute Girl Kinda Rapping to Shitty Drum Loops." And I hate to say it, but Neat Dude Collective—an entertainment, art and design group—could be the name of one of the bands playing this festival. Via Laughing Squid.

When you buy anything these days, from apple juice to an Audi A6, chances are good that at least some of your money is going to a parent company that might surprise you. It is a rare and inquisitive marketing mind that can actually remember these relationships, like the fact that Minute Maid is owned by Coca-Cola or Baked Ruffles report up to PepsiCo.

Think you've got the brand savvy to match up the marketing marionettes with their corporate puppet masters? If so, take Adweek's Brand Paternity Test below and gauge your talent for spotting consumer culture's family connections. 

Name the parent brand or holding company of ...

Amazon has taken some heat for offering T-shirts with extremely offensive, upsetting slogans—"Keep calm and rape a lot," "Keep calm and grope a lot," "Keep calm and knife her"—from a merchant called, appropriately enough, Solid Gold Bomb. The T-shirt maker apologized profusely and deleted the shirts, claiming the phrases were automatically generated by a computer script from thousands of dictionary words. It's tough to fathom how language referring to raping and groping could find its way via algorithm onto $20 T-shirts playing off England's "Keep calm and carry on" World War II mantra. Yet I doubt the company would try such a boneheaded stunt for publicity. (After this fracas, it might not survive.) Most media coverage has portrayed the episode as a complex, cautionary tale of technology gone awry, pointing out the need for greater human oversight in our age of cost- and labor-saving automation. Fair enough. It's not like the machines could comprehend such phrases. And if they can, it can mean only one of two things. Either this is their idea of a sick joke, or else they're taunting us about the rapey, knifey tech-mageddon to come.

If George Lois has yet to prevail upon you how much he hates Mad Men—and he's done so a number of times in the past few years, even though Don Draper was supposedly modeled on him—allow the 81-year-old advertising legend to do so in the video below. And then let him pitch you, somewhat randomly yet quite sincerely, on the talented folks at NYC editing company Madhouse. So, he hates Mad Men, but he loves Madhouse. Got it?

You're sitting down, doing your taxes, just trying not to hate the universe, when a pocket-picking smoke monster reaches into your jacket and steals all your cash. This is "The Price of Carbon," the latest clip from the Climate Reality Project, Al Gore's environmental advocacy group. Created with the help of D.C. communications shop Glover Park Group and Brooklyn production company m ss ng p eces, the clip uses charming—if a little arty—visuals to draw a line from oil and coal pollution to climate change to taxpayers's wallets via relief packages for the victims of natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy and last year's Midwest drought. The playful, minimalist aesthetic helps a fairly complex argument seem simple. The sing-song narration, delivered by comedian and musician Reggie Watts, also helps. So, you could do what the spot wants you to do and complain about the problem to your friends, or write a letter to Congress, or something. But if you take the crux of the video to heart—Earth is getting really pissed off at humans, the incredibly well-financed energy industry doesn't care, but c'mon, the government should try to make carbon barons pay for the damage anyway—then now might also be an appropriate time to throw on Watts's essential anthem, Fuck Shit Stack. Especially if you really are still doing your taxes.

CREDITS
Director: Dark Igloo
Executive Producer: m ss ng p eces
TV Weather Illustration: Ana Benaroya

Heidi Klum is the latest person who doesn't eat Hardee's/Carl's Jr. to film an ad for the fast-food chain. The spot, from 72andSunny, which spoofs The Graduate for whatever reason, has Klum chowing into a Jim Beam Bourbon burger in front of a younger man (and his pathetic attempt at a mustache) while the voiceover sort of compares the experience to losing one's virginity. Gross. What they should compare it to is unhinging your jaw like a boa constrictor. That burger is as big as Heidi's head. Beyond that, ads like this are destined to underperform, in a way. As an audience, either we don't pay attention to the burger because of Heidi's fabulous body, or we do pay attention to it and, well, that's weird and off-putting. If Morgan Spurlock taught us anything, it's that fast food can't be sexy. Period.

Pepsi stormed YouTube last week with one of the year's most popular videos: a clip featuring Jeff Gordon, in disguise, taking a car salesman on the most frightening test drive of his life. The video is quickly closing in on 30 million views, and got almost 10 million in a single day, last Friday, according to data from Unruly Media. The spot has also taken some heat, though, for perhaps not being quite as real as it seems. (Not that viewers seem to mind. The clip has almost 100,000 likes, some 25 times the number of dislikes.) Adweek spoke with the video's director, Gifted Youth's Peter Atencio, perhaps best known for directing and producing every episode of Comedy Central's Key & Peele. Atencio spoke about the video's enormous success, the controversy around it, and what it is about prank videos that he loves so much.

We're up to almost 30 million views on this thing. Did you have any idea it would be this popular?
Not to this level, no. We felt when we were working on it that it was going to do pretty well, just from the reaction people were having when we showed it to friends. They seemed to really love it, and were asking a lot of questions about it.

Why do you think people love it so much?
Well, I think people just like to watch other people go through a harrowing experience, when it's from the comfort of their own computer. And it all works out OK—the salesman is laughing and happy in the end, which I think makes people feel more comfortable sharing it. If he had stayed really angry at the end, I don't think people would feel as good about it.

Was Jeff pretty into the idea of the prank?
Oh yeah. He's done so many commercials over the years. To do one where he gets to play with his image and do some improv, and not be the Jeff Gordon spokesperson that he is in so many commercials—this was more of a fun, almost experimental acting exercise for him. He had a lot of fun with it.

There have been stories saying parts of the video aren't as real as they seem. Can you clear any of that up and tell us what's real and what isn't?
I can't go into ultra specifics. There's always a balance. The things that are real are the things that were important to be real, which are the salesman's reactions to what was going on. And the elements that needed to be safe or done in a way that told the story we needed to tell, those were done in such a way that no one was in harm's way. There was definitely an eye toward making sure what we were doing was in no way dangerous. But we also wanted it to be real enough that the emotion that's there is something you couldn't fake.

From what you're saying, it sounds like the salesman is a real guy, not an actor.
He's very much a real guy. His real name is Steve, and he was in for the ride of his lifetime.

You also directed Pepsi's "Behind the scenes at Coke Chase" video. Are you drawn to material that ambushes people or other brands?
Not necessarily that ambushes other brands, but I like things that play with the tropes that someone else has established. For that Pepsi ad, we just wanted to have a little fun with the universe that Coke had created and that they were taking very seriously. We just wanted to take a little air out of their tires on that one. And for this one, there's kind of a hidden-camera-prank movement, on YouTube especially, that we wanted to be a part of. That's what we do. I work on [Comedy Central sketch-comedy show] Key & Peele, and a lot of what we do there is play in the styles or genres of things that have already been established, and find ways to undermine them. It's just playing with people's expectations of conventions.

There's a lot of pranks happening in advertising lately—the elevator murder stunt, Nivea's airport ambushing. Why is it getting so popular?
I think it's definitely a trend we'll continue seeing. And I think the reason it's popular is just that there are so many prank videos on YouTube. Unfortunately a lot of them are mean-spirited for the sake of laughing at someone's expense. But between prank videos and Russian dash-cam videos, I think that's a big part of what people go online to watch these days.

And for brands, as long as they bring it back to a happy place at the end, they're probably in good shape.
Exactly, yeah.

This is surely what Google was going for with Google Glass—a product so irresistibly fashionable that Pauly D, the Jersey Shore alum, DJ and general arbiter of taste, is trying to borrow its cool by planting a knockoff pair in his latest music video, "Back to Love," with singer Jay Sean. The faux-electronic eyewear are worn by the story's obligatory perfectly coiffed love-interest. A model, she wears the glasses in the dressing room at the beginning of the video, and then again out the runway, circa 2:30. According to gender-and-technology guru Sergey Brin, that should make her seem less emasculated (if a woman can be emasculated) than if she were using a smartphone. Really, it just makes her—and anyone else walking around with a camera casually attached to his or her face—seem more ridiculous than if they were using a smartphone. Muting while watching is recommended.

From flatulence to fancy perfume, I've had a fragrant week at AdFreak. Prada has commissioned a short film by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola to tout its Candy L'Eau scent. Two guys star with Lea Seydoux, who made an impression a few years back by bouncing off walls, rolling on floors and flashing her panties in a Prada commercial. For now, the client is teasing the new effort via 12-second previews—see three of them below—that follow the fabulously quaffed and smartly attired trio to the cinema, a surprise birthday party and a beauty salon. "How much longer can we possibly all be so happy together?" Seydoux asks while enjoying a mani-pedi treatment. The three-way relationship in Truffaut's Jules and Jim was an inspiration, though the slightly muted, dreamy images here play more like Anderson's own style with dashes of Fellini and David Lynch (at their most playful and benign). The trailers work fine as mini-films, and the super-short format seems perfect for Prada or any high-end fragrance purveyor—providing slightly surreal, sweet suggestions of story line and leaving no time for the hyper-stylization to sour or the stench of pretentious commerce to creep in. For more Wes "Branderson," check out our collection of the director's top 10 commercials.

Advertising has been obsessed lately with scaring the crap out of people. So here, for your Friday enjoyment, is a more benign prank. Target, which is the exclusive retail partner for the release of Justin Timberlake's new album, got 20 of the pop star's biggest fans together for a commercial shoot. They thought they would just be singing a Timberlake song for the ad. They didn't realize the great and powerful JT himself would actually be there. Check out the spot below, and a behind-the-scenes video after the jump. All the reactions are genuine. Decent work by Deutsch in Los Angeles—though to be honest, the bar for this kind of thing was set by David Beckham and Adidas last summer. If you don't leave someone sobbing tears of joy, maybe you haven't gone far enough.

When it comes to paperwork, the designers at TBWA\South Africa in Johannesburg are a cut above. As an exercise in self-promotion, the design group transformed some of the agency's creative briefs—those not specifically requiring design recommendations—into three-dimensional paper sculptures using the pages of the documents and their nondescript envelopes as raw materials. The results, intended to capture the essence of the brand from which each brief was received, are amazing. My faves: the dress shirt for Bio Classic washing powder, with one corner of the garment composed of billowing soap bubbles; the insanely detailed ship in a bottle for Mainstay vodka; and the heaping bowl of shredded-paper noodles for Fatti's & Moni's pasta. Snatches of text from the original briefs peek through here and there. Such brand-specific words and phrases provide intriguing visual flourishes for these fusions of art and commerce. More images below. Via The Inspiration Room.

CREDITS
Client: TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris Johannesburg
Executive Creative Directors: Matthew Brink, Adam Livesey
Art Director: Jade Manning
Copywriter: Vincent Osmond
Creative Directors: Sacha Traest, Mike Groenewald
Design: Sacha Traest, Leigh-anne Salonika, Katleho Mofolo, Graeme Van Jaarsveld, Ilze Venter, Jason Fieldgate
Typographer: Hazel Buchan
Photographers: Graeme Borchers, Des Ellis
Account Manager: Vanessa Maselwa
Director: Brett de Vos
Sound: Cut and Paste, Opus
Production: Craig Walker, Simone Allem, Ingrid Shellard, Gillian Humphris

In our age of virtual sharing gone berserk, here's a refreshingly tactile effort by a British ad agency. For new restaurant Dishoom, OgilvyOne U.K. is collecting customer stories through the Internet and baking the best ones into Dishoom's dinner plates—each one nicely designed in a way that fits that particular story. The campaign draws on an ethnic tradition. Dishoom is an Irani café—styled after similar cafés opened in India in the 19th century by Iranian and Persian immigrants. The sharing of stories over food was a big part of the Iranian café tradition (and restaurant tradition generally). OgilvyOne started the campaign with 80 plates featuring the personal memories of Irani cafés from the older generation in Bombay and the U.K. See some examples below. Now, new visitors are being asked to contribute. "Crazy and unusual anecdotes are very much encouraged!" says the site. "Tell what you used to do—whether it was hanging out with friends, dating, bunking off, doing business deals, finding inspiration. Tell us how the food tasted, the conversations you overheard, how the place felt, the more personal your stories the better." Via Creative Review.

It was my first visit to India. I was in Churchgate near the station and used to visit this old cafe on the corner for some of the best dosas and uttapas in town. The owner introduced himself and made me feel like he was one of my uncles. Uncle Satish or 'Satishbhai' as I called him invited me to their late night card games, and I learnt all sorts and made all sorts of new friends. Only in such a cafe, could you feel like you were part of the family as soon as you walk in, and leave with not only a full stomach, but a whole new bunch of friends.

Adi was tickled when he heard about my memories of the cutlet gravy at Cafe Excelsior from a decade back. He immediately called for a plate of gravy for me to taste. I took a spoonful…creamy yet edgy…an initial soothing sip followed by a slow but resounding hit of chillies. A very elegant and yet passionate sauce. I liked it so much that I finished the contents of the saucer. Seeing the delight on my face Adi insisted on packing some cutlets and gravy for me to take home…and some slices of bread too….the bread turned out to be as soft as Cupid's cheeks. I pointed out the lack of salt in the dhansak to Adi. "Well that's good for old people no with BP? Others can add salt" said Adi with a smile.

Colaba is the most popular tourist hub of Bombay because of the famous Taj hotel and gateway of India. A lot of Iranians migrated and settled in Colaba. They relate to this place a lot. Everytime I come here, I see them sitting around and it makes me feel comfortable. I've been a student of Xaviers College and have been very fond of this Irani Café, especially when you have a tight budget cause I'm in college. The food is very affordable. Every time I have a friend visiting, I bring them here to give them a taste of the real Bombay experience.

I once asked Mr. Kohinoor, who is 83 and owns Britannia Restaurant what would happen to Britannia when he was no longer with us. Gesturing towards his son and brother he exclaimed (a bit loudly!) "The moment I'm gone, these buggers will shut the place down!"

I held Bapa's hand tightly.
I was so scared
So many people
And I, so small
I sat in the chair
My chin on the table
He ordered
I stared
It came.
I smiled
A big smile.
Tutti Frutti Ice Cream.

Afshin Kohinoor, Boman's son, started talking to us at length about the restaurant. He pointed to the portraits hung on the wall, spoke about the letter written to his father by the Queen of England, and pointed to one of their latest awards. …and then willingly posed for me with a trophy. And then when we were leaving, asked us to return with our boyfriends. "I don't want to see you alone next time," he said.

Overheard one evening in an Irani café in South Mumbai's Fort District. A customer complains to the owner, that there is no sugar in his tea. "Did I call you? Did I say, come to my shop and drink tea? You are the one who climbed the steps and came. Today there are no complaints. Everyone's quietly drunk their tea and gone. No one said anything. What are these tantrums that you come up with .... God knows how your wife stays with you. Is she still with you or has she eloped and run away."

If you've been under a rock, violence against women in India has been all over the news since last December following the horrific gang rape of a young woman who had the audacity to take a bus. She died from her injuries, sparking protests across India. So now when I tell you Ford has had to apologize for ads created by JWT India that depict women tied up in the back of a Ford Figo, you won't be quite so surprised. The ads never ran, but were picked up when the Internet, always on the lookout for something to be offended about, found them on Ads of the World. In one illustration, Paris Hilton has tied up the Kardashians and stuck them in her boot. In another, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has roped himself three scantily clad women. The tagline: "Leave your worries behind with Figo's extra-large boot." For those who say some people are just too sensitive to hilarious cartoon violence against women, let me explain a few things: 1) It's not less violent because it's a cartoon. 2) It's not less violent if the violence is perpetrated by another woman. 3) It's about time people got upset over casual violence toward women, which is all over the place. The sad thing is that it has to be triggered by extreme events for people to notice what's been there all along. 4) Yes, there are ads that show violence against men (though they're a lot fewer). No, people are not saying violence against men is acceptable in ads just because they're saying violence against women is unacceptable. 5) Yes, it's obviously intended as a joke. But jokes exist in context, and right now, it's really, really, superbly unfunny. It's just too bad for Ford that the brand will suffer for ads it didn't even approve. It's a good reminder that the Internet doesn't know the difference.

Google's latest innovation in time-wasting fun—this time out of Japan—is the Chrome World Wide Maze, a browser experiment that turns any web page of your choosing into a 3-D marble maze. You need a smartphone for this to work properly (and, of course, Chrome for Mobile), since it becomes your controller once you've synced it up with your computer. The mobile-phone-as-game-controller idea has promise, and isn't much different from the Wii U's current setup. But they'll have to do more than this to make up for axing Google Reader. Jerks.

Considering how much you hear about drones these days, it's surprising we haven't seen more marketing stunts using remote-controlled hoverbots. But Paramount Pictures pulled off an interesting trick this weekend by using glowing quadrotors to create a Star Trek logo over London. The promotion, for the franchise's latest film, Star Trek Into Darkness, was timed to mark the end of the World Wildlife Fund's annual Earth Hour, which encourages cities to turn off nonessential lights for environmental awareness. As the hour of darkness ended, the 30 drones' LED lights (charged through renewable energy sources) turned on to form the insignia of Star Trek's Starfleet. Created by Ars Electonica Futurelab and Ascending Technologies, the result is pretty impressive—when viewed from the right angle, at least. Check out a video below, and enjoy the moment at 1:20 when two of the drones at the bottom of the frame seem to collide, sending one plummeting out of the sky.