Today’s Ad Of The Day is as pleasurable to watch as aluminum foil is to chew on.

In other words, it is completely irksome.

Comedic duo Rhett and Link’s latest ad for the Ryan Lee Chiropractic Center in Los Angeles is basic infomercial fodder.

The only difference is that the sound effects produced by the chiropractor adjusting his patients are way too realistic and much too frequent.

The repeated crunching sound is nauseating.

Yes, we want to know that Ryan Lee is a competent chiropractor. But listening to him crack his patients’ bones over and over, all the while maintaining intense eye contact with the camera, is just too much.

Best case scenario, if you’re in a lot of pain, the commercial could be weirdly cathartic. Watch below and decide for yourself.

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Orb, who won the Kentucky Derby, is the favorite to win the 138th Preakness Stakes on Saturday. The morning line odds have him at evens — which means there’s absolutely no point in betting on him. (Why bet $10 just to win $10?)

Orb ran such a good race — coming from behind, and going the long way around the pack on the outside — that everyone just wants him to win tomorrow so he can have a shot at the triple crown at Belmont.

Plus, people seem to love owner Shug McGaughey, an old school gent who doesn’t dope his horses.

But there’s an obvious problem for Orb. He’s got the No.1 inside track position. If he runs from behind again, he might get boxed in by the other horses and not be able to find a way through to the front. The Preakness (9.5 furlongs) is shorter than the derby (10 furlongs) so Orb has less time to repeat his round-the-outside trick from the last race.

So we have turned to our trusty horse-racing Excel spreadsheet for some non-Orb “investment” ideas on the race. Horse racing is, after all, really boring unless you have money riding on it.

Here’s how it works.

There are 9 horses in the running Saturday. So at the outset, assuming you know nothing about horses (guilty), you have a 1 in 9 chance of picking the winner.

Those are NOT good odds.

Some horses have better chances than others at winning — some might not like longer races, for instance — and the odds adjust on each horse bettors place their bets.

But the bottom line is that in theory, any horse can win.

So a person approaching the Preakness as if it were a probability problem might want to ask, how many horses can I bet on and still come out ahead if any one horse wins? Put another way, can I spread my bets among as many horses as possible and still come out ahead?

The formulas in my spreadsheet ask, for a $10 bet on each horse, how many horses can I bet on and still be able to win more than the total amount of money I’ve wagered?

This year, you can bet on five of the 9 horses at the current odds, and if any of them win you’ll come out nicely ahead. That reduces your overall odds to something better than a 50/50 coin flip.

Now that’s an interesting bet.

Of course, your portfolio will contain NONE of the favorites. In other words, you’re betting on all the horses the bookies think will most likely lose, because they have the longest odds. But you’re covering as much of the field as possible. Remember, you only need ONE horse to come in good, and horses have a funny way of defying expectations.

The horses you must bet on are these: Titletown Five, Oxbow, Will Take Charge, Governor Charlie and ItsMyLuckyDay.

A $10 bet on each one to win will cost you $50. If any of them come first you will win at least $120 and as much as $300. (I’ve built in a margin to give the betting a purpose.)

Personally, I use the spreadsheet as an advisor, not a decider. Remember the Edwards Quant Fallacy: There’s a difference between having good data and applying judgment to good data.

So at post time consider picking only three or four horses, some at good odds and some at long odds. That limits your losses but makes your gains interesting. The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll add some genuine excitement to a race that is, otherwise, two minutes of chaos.

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It comes as no surprise that the telegenic David Beckham, who just announced his plans for retirement, has appeared in more television commercials than any other player in the history of soccer.

He is buff, athletic, and not a bad actor.

Over the course of his career, the 38-year-old has appeared in spots for major brands like Adidas, Diet Coke, and Emporio Armani (with wife Victoria).

Naturally, many of them went viral. Bubonic plague viral.

The most infectious example is a 90-second epic directed by Guy Richie for H&M. It shows an underpants-clad Beckham in pursuit of a car that had accidentally yanked off his bathrobe as it drove off. 

Check out the ad below to add on to the video’s 9.6 million views. And click here if you are interested in the other 65 Beckham videos that went viral.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft’s Internal Attack Video Against Google Chrome Is ‘Leaked’ >

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We’re giving you a chance to win a Kindle Fire HD.  Become a newsletter subscriber now to enter.  If you’re the lucky winner you will have a host of features at your fingertips.  

Entry deadline is May 31.

As a newsletter subscriber, you’ll get daily updates and alerts on topics that matter most to you. You must subscribe to at least one newsletter to be eligible, so if you haven’t already, be sure to choose one or more before submitting your entry.

CLICK HERE TO ENTER >

On or after May 31, 2013, we’ll announce the lucky winner.

You must be a legal resident of the U.S. and a newsletter subscriber to win.

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An anonymous source told The New York Post that Rihanna’s team tried to negotiate with Topshop’s owners for eight months “but they offered her $5,000 and didn’t care,” reports the Post. 

“Rihanna’s management asked Topshop a number of times to stop selling her image and were told, ‘We do what we want.’ They buy the pictures from a photographer, but they do not pay the artist licensing fees. Unfortunately, UK law does not protect the artist,” the source told The Post. 

Here’s the tank top in question: 

Until now, Rihanna has often been photographed wearing the affordable brand’s clothing. 

SEE ALSO: Too Hot For Victoria’s Secret: The Miranda Kerr Story

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If Yahoo! buys Tumblr for $1 billion, as some reports have suggested, one fact is likely to get cited a lot when the deal is announced: That Tumblr had only $13 million in revenue in 2012, after taking $125 million in investor funding.

With lousy economics like that, why would Yahoo even consider such a high price?

It’s worth comparing a putative Yahoo-Tumblr deal to Facebook‘s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram last year. And not simply because the headline price is the same.

It turns out there are a lot of similarities between the way Yahoo and Tumblr might work together, and the way Facebook and Instagram now work together.

Clearly, Tumblr’s business is embryonic at best.

Tumblr CEO David Karp used to be actively disinterested in advertising. (He once said it “turns our stomachs.”) he preferred to perfect Tumblr’s user experience and scale up its member base. Back in 2011, Tumblr’s sponsorship efforts were a joke. It only began taking ad dollars a year ago.

More recently, however, Tumblr has taken several steps that show it is serious about monetizing its 90 million daily posts from its 100 million bloggers. A lot of them are reminiscent of Facebook’s path to its IPO and after that the acquisition of Instagram:

• Tumblr has started offering sponsored posts in the feeds of mobile users, just like Facebook does with “sponsored stories.”
• It hired a new head of ad sales, Lee Brown, from Groupon. When Facebook hired Carolyn Everson as head of its ad sales, from Microsoft, it changed the way ad agencies viewed the site — and money began pouring in.
• Tumblr has named a Creative A-List of agencies it likes to work with — a bit like Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer list of approved ad suppliers.
• Tumblr has begun to beef up its analytic offerings — because advertisers don’t want to touch media if they can’t measure what they’re getting for their money.
• Tumblr suffers from the same initial problem advertisers had with Facebook: That once brands have made a few posts on their Tumblr, they get bored of using the free tools and their activity drops off. Creating free content that’s cool and engaging is difficult and time consuming. It’s easier to just advertise and pay for the forced exposure.
• And advertisers have grumbled about not “getting”  Tumblr, just as they used to about Facebook. Digiday reported, “One provider of social management tools said literally no clients had pushed for Tumblr to be included. That’s a major red flag.”

What most people misunderstand about Tumblr, and what Yahoo may feel is worth paying for, is that Tumblr is NOT best described as a “blogging platform.”

Sure, users have blogs on which they post things. But once you’re a Tumblr user, you find that the real fun of Tumblr is building a news feed that only you can see from other users you like. Want an all-skateboarding, all the time news feed? Tumblr. As members begin to follow each other, they can start messaging each other.

The real party on Tumblr is going on behind the dashboard, not on the blogs’ outer faces.

That party is why Tumblr has become so big among young people — it’s basically a cool social hangout that their parents haven’t figured out yet.

Tumblr’s dashboard feeds are obviously easy to monetize in the future, just as Facebook and Instagram’s friend feeds are and will be.

Which is why $1 billion suddenly doesn’t seem completely crazy for a $13 million startup.

SEE ALSO: Here’s Tumblr’s Total Revenue For 2012 — And How It Will Make A Profit In 2013

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Following CBS upfronts, CEO Les Moonves disclosed the extremely high ad dollar potential for targeting DVR viewers who watch their favorite shows up to a week after they air.

“A little less than 20% of the ad buys this time around will be for people who watch later,” Moonves said, which according to Bloomberg adds up to a whopping $570 million.

Until fairly recently, advertisers have regarded DVR viewers with disdain. Who wants to reach someone who couldn’t be bothered to watch the show live, and may try to skip the commercials anyway?

And Moonves said that next year, some part of 85% of ad budgets will go to targeting people watching on DVR.

The new strategy makes sense. During the week that ended on March 10, 2013, CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory” only received a 5.5 live rating among the 18-49 year-old sweet spot versus a 7.5 rating in the seven-day DVR playback.

Moonves is now fighting for DVR viewing to be counted “equally” as live viewings when Nielsen calculates audience measurements.

“Some of our hit programs literally are only watched 60 percent now live,” Moonves said at the Deutsch Bank Media and Telecom conference in early March. “We have over 10 shows that add 3-4 million that are watched after the live viewing of it.”

CBS has had a complex history with its attitude towards DVR viewing. The network has actively fought Dish Network’s Hopper DVR, which would allow viewers to automatically skip ads using AutoHop. There are even rumors that CBS asked “Big Bang Theory” star Kaley Cuoco to delete a tweet that praised the Hopper.

Considering the potential ad money to be made by DVR-ed shows, its hardly surprising that Moonves would be vehemently anti-Hopper.

SEE ALSO: American Apparel’s ‘Unisex’ Ads Show Men And Women Very Differently >

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Allure magazine is feeling the heat after printing “Star Trek” actress Zoe Saldana’s weight on its June cover.

“Zoe Saldana: 115 Pounds of Grit and Heartache,” the headline reads.

And people did not like that.

New York mag’s The Cut called it “bizarre and necessary,” adding “several hundred pages of possibly decent editorial content, overshadowed by a stupid cover line.”

Yahoo’s omg! also slammed the beauty mag: “Every time we seem to be making progress in the way women are portrayed in magazines, somehow we take a step back,” before concluding that “the decision to showcase Saldana’s digits seems so … unnecessary.”

Saldana, on the other hand, defended the magazine’s editorial decision and explained during an interview on “Today”:

“I think it would have been wrong if they were lying about my weight. This is how much I weigh, it’s something I can’t control, it’s who I am. I’ve always been a very thin frame, I was a ballet dancer. I don’t think it was to make an issue of my weight. I think it was to say for a lightweight person, I seem to be really strong-minded.”

Hollywood Life’s Bonnie Fuller responded by explaining to ABC News, “I really think the editors were setting out to be complimentary. They wanted to show that a woman could be small in size, but powerful in spirit.”

So after all of the back-and-forth, Allure opened up the conversation on their Facebook page, writing:

There’s been some talk around the blogosphere about the cover line for our story about Zoë Saldana, “115 Pounds of Grit and Heartache.” The girl is a powerhouse. And we were so impressed by what a tough, confident woman Saldana is (on-screen, in her action-movie roles, and off) that we wanted to capture that. But some people have said citing her weight on the cover was a mistake. Here’s your chance to sound off: Tell us what you think!”

The post currently has over 315 comments.

Some are critical of the magazine, writing “Would you have posted her weight if she had been 200 pounds??? I bet not” and “Definitely a mistake. I can tell you for a fact that many young girls to young women are going to strive to be 115 lbs; no matter what their body type.”

Others were more supportive, “I don’t know why people freak out over the fact that she weighs 115 lbs. Good for her. I am sure she works her ass off to maintain that weight, and she should…it contributes to her livelihood. It’s part of her ‘job’ and the acting parts that she prefers to play. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

Regardless of your opinion, there’s no denying the controversy will likely lead to a good bump in this month’s magazine sales.

SEE ALSO: Mo’Nique documents her 80lb weight loss via Twitter >

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An “internal” Microsoft video that parodies a Google Chrome commercial, warning consumers that the search engine is “following you” and “monetizing you” has somehow made its way to YouTube.

According to a Microsoft spokesperson communicating with Mashable, the video strictly intended for internal use was “leaked.” 

The spoof ad (see below) draws on the imagery and soundtrack of Google’s original “Chrome: Now Everywhere” spot. Only the text has been replaced.

Instead of touting the virtues of Google’s omnipresence on the web, the new titles alert viewers of the search engine’s ability to exploit their privacy. The new narrative created by Microsoft imbues Google’s tagline “Now Everywhere,” with an ominous patina.

Does this sound like the kind of sinister tactic a jaded political consultant might use to attack an opponent? By amazing coincidence, as The New York Times reported late last year, Mark Penn — the strategist who ran Hillary Clinton‘s failed 2008 primary campaign — is now applying his attack-dog acumen to guide Microsoft’s ongoing battle with Google.

Penn is the mastermind behind the “Scroogled” campaign that has been running since last year. The video advances the campaign’s theme: Google is misusing the information they collect when consumers use their search engine and making tremendous profits in the process.

In another amazing coincidence, the parody video surfaced halfway through Google’s I/O developer conference. While Google CEO Larry Page made no direct reference to the campaign during his appearance at the conference on Wednesday, he implicitly lamented Microsoft’s attack strategy. “Every story I read about Google, it’s kind of us versus some other company.” Being negative, he added, “is not how we make progress,”

The two companies’ latest conflict is over a Windows YouTube Phone app that does not offer advertising. Google has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Microsoft asking the company to remove the app until advertising capability has been installed.

Whether the Google attack video will move the needle in Microsoft’s favor is yet to be determined. The last time we checked the parody had drawn just 138,368 viewers.

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Domino Brazil is taking “smellvertising” to the next level.

The pizza chain and agency Artplan Sao Paolo is teaming up with 10 Brazilian video rental stores to turn popular DVDs — including “Argo” and “The Dark Knight” — into inedible pizzas.

DVD players essentially turn into mini-microwaves. As soon as the disks get hot when played, they start to smell like Domino’s. After the DVD is ejected, special thermal ink has turned the disk into a mini pizza that reads: “Did you enjoy the movie? The next one will be even better with a hot and delicious Domino’s Pizza.”

Strange as this sounds, the promotion does teach a valuable lesson: There are still 10 video rental stores that exist in Brazil.

ArtPlan art director Diogo Barbosa explained to Creativity Online that “in Brazil streaming services like Netflix and iTunes are relatively new, and for people with good social conditions. Also our broadband connection isn’t as fast as that used in the U.S., and because of that we still have video rental stores in your neighborhoods.”

SEE ALSO: How It Would Look If Men Posed The Way Female American Apparel Models Do >

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