Blondes may or may not have more fun, but at least in the case of Beyonce, blonde makes for a more popular ad.

Last week H&M rolled out two ads [below] featuring the pop star. In one, her hair is blond and she's wearing a swimsuit, in the other it's brunette and she's wearing a revealing dress. Both ads feature the same song and similar dance routines.

The ad featuring Beyonce as a blonde scored significantly better with consumers, and 16% of consumers mentioned the singer by name, according to research from AceMetrix. In contrast, in the ad featuring Beyonce as a brunette, attention scores were lower and only 7% of consumers referenced the singer by name. Of course, it could be that the Beyonce in a bikini outperforms Beyonce in a wet, clinging dress.

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"Fake Apple Store," "Tater Tot" and "Barnacle." All are contenders in the naming of Victors & Spoils' new conference room, the latest crowdsourced project launched by the Havas-owned agency.

It sounds over the top to put out a brief to come up with a moniker for where you go rehearse powerpoints or furtively call your spouse, but the truth is, crowdsourcing on this occasion is probably a fairly efficient way of doing something that normally seems to eat up a lot of staff time at agencies, marketers and, especially, at tech companies.

To underscore how weighty a decision it can be, here's a Quora thread on the topic, and here's a very lengthy Reddit thread on the topic. Any number of Yelp, Ask and other pages exist with lots of earnest askers for help, and responders too.

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Dove took over the web this week with a moving video that uses a forensic sketch artist to show women that they're more beautiful than they think. Now comes the inevitable parody -- in which guys test their own self-image.

Here's the parody:

And if you haven't seen it yet, here's the original, the latest from Dove on the "Real Beauty" theme:

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If you're an ad person, and you're on Twitter, you've probably caught at least a few #AgencyLife tweets in your stream.

The hashtag, which was fueled by the blog Adland, caught on like wildfire Thursday in the span of just a few hours, with hundreds of tweets by ad people eager to poke some fun at themselves and blow off some steam. Makes sense; ad folks usually tend to have a good sense of humor. But many people were expressing that the missives didn't feel like mere jokes and rang a bit too close to home.

Below is a selection of them. That last tweet has to make you wonder about the state of morale in the business today.

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How does Don Draper measure up to the competition? And how does the work of today compare with that of the '60s? Check out some of the classics from advertising's golden age and see how far creativity has come -- or not.

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It felt fairly obvious to us that P&G's Bacon Mouthwash was just a fairly lame April Fool's Joke.

But marketers beware: Not all consumers have a funny bone. After Scope on its Facebook page yesterday announced that it was just kidding about Scope Bacon, hundreds weighed in, posting comments to express their displeasure over being tricked into thinking this was a genuine product. Some said they were already searching store aisles for it, others awaiting to cut coupons to get Bacon Mouthwash on sale, and several are wishing the worst upon P&G for starting an April Fool's joke before April 1.

April Zittlow:

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Procter & Gamble Co. has "launched" bacon-flavored Scope with a video from Publicis Kaplan Thaler, New York.

The question is, is it real? Well, it's got a hashtag, #ScopeBacon, and P&G has begun tweeting about it from its official @ScopeMouthwash account. It's also enlisted help from @Charmin, which has been taking a break from updates on the community managers' toileting activities to tout the new bacon-flavored variant today.

Trouble is (besides the fact that it sounds downright disgusting) the product has yet to show up on store shelves or in the search engines of online retailers, not even ThinkGeek.com, a leading purveyor of all things bacon-related. A spokesman for Scope declined to comment prior to 8 p.m. on April 1, if that provides any hints.

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"Mad Men" star Jon Hamm may be sick and tired of the obsession over his crotch -- as he told Rolling Stone magazine in their current cover story "They're called 'privates' for a reason. I'm wearing pants, for fuck's sake. Lay off" -- but brands want a piece of his action bad.

For months there was debate over whether photos snapped of Mr. Hamm that depicted a rather large bulge in his pants had been digitally enhanced. But a Daily News report last week ended that speculation, saying the actor was asked by AMC executives to quit going commando in the snug, tailored 60s suits he wears and start reigning it in.

"This season takes place in the 1960s, where the pants are very tight and leave little to the imagination," a source told newspaper. "Jon's impressive anatomy is so distracting that they politely insisted on underwear." The Daily News added: Our insider says that during seasons one and two, AMC's marketing team even had to do some Photoshop magic on promotional booklets that went out to press in order to make his privates more, well, private."

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Pound for pound, some of the stupidest commentary online and on TV as media prognosticators waited for the Pope to be revealed today was the notion that the next Pope needed to be on Twitter. Or what? Social media gurus were going to totally abandon the Catholic church in droves? Twitter addicts were going to stop donating all that money to the church?

At any rate, the next pope, Argentina's Jorge Bergoglio, was already on Twitter!

Or so certain media people who decided to Google him discovered. This afternoon, a number of folks (including one journalist who should have known better) discovered the account of @JMBergoglio. And unlike the last Pope's, this one was fairly active. It was also in Spanish, which some of us don't read because we took French in high school.

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All you ad agency kids thinking your "Harlem Shake" knock-offs and "Call Me Maybe" lip-syncing is so original, think again.

Ogilvy & Mather beat you to the punch by about thirty years with this amazing promotional clip it made back in, it seems, 1982. It begins with a swelling Broadway-style tune, in which a few agency newbies wonder songfully what this next step in their career will bring as they take lunch in the agency cafeteria.

Sample lyrics include:

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The subscription-commerce industry has jumped the shark, as evidenced by the uproar caused yesterday by the arrival of HelloFlo, a new company that exists solely to mail Always and Tampax Pearl tampons to women around their period every month -- since women in 2013 are apparently so busy they can no longer keep track of their menstruation cycles.

As the founder Naama Bloom told TechCrunch: "There are no good reminders that are also tied in with the product. There have been so many times when I've been caught off guard and needed to run out to the drugstore at an inconvenient time."

It's a sad state of affairs really, that one of our group's thinks we women are so lazy that we can't hit the nearest Target or Walgreens -- even better yet, stock up and buy bulk on Amazon.com or Drugstore.com. What's maybe scarier, though, is that it's hardly the first service. Many others came before it, like Juniper and Trinket Women were already sending feminine products.

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When you think about it, your typical political ad isn't much different from the pitch in a dating profile: "Here are my qualifications. Please like me!"

But a recent ad from Pete Snyder, former CEO of New Media Strategies, makes that connection abundantly clear and weirdly hilarious.

Snyder is aiming for the Lieutenant Governor's seat in Virginia. The next step in the process is getting the nomination at the Republican convention in May. And at the moment, he's in a crowded field of seven.

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