You really have to give it to the Costa Brava Girona tourism board in Spain. For a new ad campaign the board wanted to show how its picturesque its beaches are. Unfortunately they were not able to find photos that they described as 'sufficient quality' and instead used pictures of a beach in Barbados!

The image they used shows a golden colored beach with a women walking alone in the blissful sun, it almost looks like she is on a deserted island. Where as the real Costa Brava beach has dark colored sand and is so crowded that on a good day you are lucky if you can find somewhere to put your towel.

When Dolors Batallé, the director of the Costa Brava Girona tourism board, was questioned about the misleading ad by the local media she was quoted as saying that it would be "a wicked interpretation" to suggest that the board was trying to hide the truth about the Costa Brava by using a photo of a beach from the Caribbean. 

Right! A 'wicked interpretation' - obviously, I mean how could anyone possibly think that that a photo of a beach that has Costa Brava written across it IS ACTUALLY Costa Brava.

Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit edition always generates a lot of buzz, but this year it is going all out, striking deals left, right and centre in an effort to generate extra revenue.

Such deals include having Pepsi’s SoBe drink sponsor the YouTube videos of the models frolicking on the beach and having a Southwest Airlines Jet featuring an image of supermodel Bar Refaeli take VIPs to a launch party.

At the launch event, stunt drivers sponsored by Nissan will race cars on a lot adjacent to the Luxor hotel, with models as their passengers.

Such promotions will no doubt help the magazine offset a drop in print ads.

Hair removal, especially waxing, can be a pain. A cosmetic treatment clinic in the Middle East has found a witty way of highlighting this with a specially-designed billboard. Post-it notes attached to said billboard carry details of laser hair removal treatment and contact details for the clinic and the message "waxing is a rip off". In order to take the details, passers by must remove the "wax strip" (the post it) from the picture of a hairy back. Each of the sticky notes have hair printed onto the back of them.

The campaign follows on from an equally tactile and interactive one for the clinic's skin resurfacing services. See CMDglobal.com for the full case study.

You might be forgiven for associating actor Ashton Kutcher with the brainless but mildly entertaining show Punk'd and the frankly unforgivable movie "Dude Where's My Car?" However, it looks like there is a shrewd business mind somewhere behind the Hollywood fluff after all. Kutcher has secured funding from Frito Lay snack Cheetos to produce a web series centred around his own production company, called KatalystHQ.

While web series are nothing new, the way this one is distributed is: he has signed a deal with Slide's FunSpace that will see the series aired via a Facebook application. It is the first sponsored series to be hosted on Facebook and follows in the footsteps of the likes of Seth McFarlane's Google deal.

Cheetos are being worked into the plotline, which the makers describe as a humorous fly-on-the-wall reality parody. Whatever that means...

See the full case study at www.cmdglobal.com

Homeless charity Crisis is the latest brand to jump aboard the snow-media bandwagon. It placed panels of cardboard boxes, traditionally used by homeless people as rudimentary mattresses, on the streets of London in amongst the snow. The message on the card read: "Loving the snow? Try sleeping in it" along with a URL.

It follows tactical campaigns by Tango and Extreme earlier this week

We are all familiar with the glare of a cmoputer that causes eye-strain, but a skin cancer (Skcin) charity has tried to dupe people into thinking they could get a suntan from their computer screen via a new technology "ComputerTan". The elaborate hoax was intended to raise awareness about the threat of skin cancer in the UK and specifically discourage under-18s from using sunbeds.

See the full case study here

Coming soon to a hospital near you - hospital advertising, brought to you by Lighthouse Advertising. Before you conjure up images of ceiling posters in hospital wards advertising legal services ("It's not too late to write that will"), Lighthouse has insisted that there are strict guidelines in terms of the placement of ads and the types of ads.

Posters are positioned to target day patients, visitors and staff and won't be located in wards or treatment rooms. Furthermore no alcohol, baby milk formula, tobacco or most worryingly funeral director are permitted to advertise.

There were, however, no guidelines preventing dating sites for widows or carpet blood stain remover.

While many in the UK have been in hibernation mode, sheltering from the snow-storms, sports channel Extreme was using the snow as a canvas in which to place an imprint of its logo.

For the full case study, see www.CMDglobal.com