2008 is shaping up to be a bad year for guerrilla advertising

2007 was the year when so-called "guerrilla advertising," or "viral marketing," made its national debut. The greatest success of that year was probably Cartoon Network's ill-fated (but no doubt great for ratings) stunt in Boston. It was with no small amount of enthusiasm that we waited for this year's spate of advertising. Indeed, after such a paradigm shift in advertising, it seemed self-evident that the multibillion-dollar advertising firms would come up with some truly ingenious riffs on an utterly new method.

Well, reader, we were wrong. We're more than halfway into 2008 and viral ads so far have been pretty much just as crappy and unoriginal as their mainstream brethren: flogging a product by associating it with either sex, fun, or wealth.

Rather than abandon our search, we've decided to compile a list of the crappiest viral advertising campaigns in 2008 thus far. The focus of our inquiry now falls upon those companies that saw all the promise of the viral video, but observed none of its premises.