It’s not often that Keith Olbermann singles out the creative team of an ad for his Worst Person In the World designation. Usually that’s an honor reserved for Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or Fox News.

Last night, though, Olbermann rightly called out DDB Brazil for a public service ad that was in excruciating bad taste. The New York Daily News writes about it over here and the World Wildlife Fund, for whom the ad was created, strongly condemns the ad over here.

Takeaway for marketers: There are infinite ways to create buzz and generate attention, many of them flat-out wrong. If you’re asking yourself, “Do we really need to go there?” you probably don’t. Or shouldn’t.

A coupla years ago, we were talking about how the MySpace audience was moving to Facebook. Is the Facebook audience now ready to make their move? Virginia Heffernan reports in the New York Times on what is either an outlier or the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Takeaway for marketers: What I noted three years ago still stands: The online audience is like a school of fish. They dart this way and that en masse, and dropping your bait into their midst is often the surest way to drive them away. Cast your net with care.

Posting repetitive and shameless self-promotion like this is the fastest way to get removed from the Twitter feed of anyone who’s paying any real attention.

Takeaway for marketers: If you think Twitter is about quickly building up a lot of followers and then spamming them like this, you’re as wrong as wrong can be.

Oops. Maybe someone at the White House should have picked up the phone and chatted with someone over at the FTC.

Takeaway for marketers: And for the White House: Confirmed opt-in is the way to go.

I went to Google News this morning and searched for “marketing” to see what current marketing-related news I may have missed over the last few days. The results were fascinating.

The top result was a ClickZ job listing for Director of Search Engine Marketing. Results two, three and nine of the top 10 were PRWeb and Emediawire releases.

Think about that: Two of the top three organic Google News search results, and three of the top 10, were press releases.

But wait, there’s more: Over on Bing, a search for “marketing” finds zero press release results in the top 10. What’s number-one? Wikipedia. That’s the case, too, on Google Caffeine, on which a search for “marketing” also finds a total lack of press release results — and a virtual duplication of the results one finds on Bing.

So let me amend what I said yesterday about Google Caffeine. When I wrote, “I suspect from the marketer’s perspective there’ll be little impact in the grand scheme of things,” I was thinking more about about keyword marketers than anything else. Google gets the vast majority of search traffic, so keyword marketers will still be flocking to Google with their dollars as tactic number-one.

But if Google Caffeine scrubs press release material out of the top 10 search results, then the world of SEO-related PR is going to change significantly. And if Wikipedia entries are given far more weight in results than before, then Wikipedia better brace itself for a tsunami of attempts to game their system.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re involved in a pro-active online communications outreach program and you’re not looking at developing and issuing your own press release content, you’re missing out on a good tactic … for the moment.