He may have joked about buying Pluto on April Fool's Day, but Sir Richard Branson's latest brand adventure is no joke.

In his latest quest to prove the elasticity of his brand (and imagination), Branson today officially unveiled Virgin Oceanic, a two-year deep sea mission "to assist science in understanding our eco system and raise awareness of the challenges facing our Oceans."

With the tagline "Five Dives, Five Oceans, One Planet," the scientific expedition was announced during Earth Month with the goal of exploring the deepest points in the world's oceans, but it won't be a sightseeing expedition.Continue reading...

Not satisfied to set a Guinness World Record, Charlie Sheen clearly feels he needs to be even more "winning." The verbose actor today filed a $100 million lawsuit against Two and a Half Men producer Chuck Lorre and Warner Bros. Television, which produces the hit series for CBS.

Who else is winning from Sheen’s public tirades and manic self-promotion? Consider brands like Zazzle, a Silicon Valley startup whose business — instant customization of 50 or so products — has catapulted overnight to feed a public eager to capture Sheen's catchphrases on t-shirts.

By popular demand on zazzle.com, they’ve been churning out t-shirts with variations on Sheen’s "winning," "tiger blood" and other bon mots at a steady clip, making up a healthy chunk of the 150,000 user-customized products it manufactures daily. Its instant response to the Sheen phenom also garnered it a CNN profile this week.Continue reading...

Microsoft announced today it has sold more than 10 million Kinect systems for the Xbox 360, setting a Guinness World Record for fastest-selling consumer device. As Mashable points out, Kinect sales have slowed since Christmas — but still: Yeah, yeah, yeah indeed.

Continental won't be part of Lincoln's immediate future.

Ford designs Amazing Race-type promotion for the new Focus.

Guinness World Records is helping brands dream up marketing stunts.

Marvel Entertainment takes the long view in promoting The Avengers, a movie not due out until 2012.

Mercedes-Benz relies on testimonials in new ads for the safety of its vehicles.Continue reading...

Meet Dot: the world's smallest stop-motion animated character. Designed to demonstrate Nokia's latest cutting-edge technology, her filmed tale, above, has set a Guinness World Record.

The back story: Dot was shot on the latest Nokia N8 as a means to showcase the smartphone’s 12-megapixel photography capabilities and the CellScope, a Nokia device with a microscope attachment.

Realized by the UK's Aardman Animation, the Oscar-winning creators of the Wallace and Gromit series, the short film was commissioned by Nokia to depict the 9mm character's struggles to navigate a microscopic world.

An impressive technological feat, to be sure. What's next? Nano-level image capture? (See the making of after the jump for more details.)Continue reading...

The eager seductress has a long and honored heritage in the business of branding and marketing men’s shaving supplies.

Remember Gunilla Knutson, the Swedish model who purred, “Take it off – take it aaallll off!” in those Noxzema Medicated Instant Shave Cream commercials in the late Sixties and early Seventies? None too subtly, “The Stripper” song played in the background.

Well, at least in those ads, plenty still was left to the imagination.

Schick apparently has decided that the imagination is overrated and outdated, at least when it comes to advertising its Schick Hydro razor. In the spot above, a young woman appears to disrobe in front of a guy who probably was only hoping for hydration, and then throws her top at him.Continue reading...