When the Twitter accounts of such icons as Britney Spears, President-elect Obama and Fox News were hijacked earlier this month, the story quickly became one of the hottest topics online.

So it was natural for anyone looking for hits to jump on the bandwagon.

Few do this kind of thing as well as the satiric former tabloid Weekly World News, which proudly broke the news, “BIGFOOT TWITTER HACKED.”

Followers to the @weeklyworldnews Twitter feed could click on a link that brought themto the humor newspaper’s web site, where they found a screen grab showing that @originalbigfoot had tweeted some untrue words about his supernatural friend, the Loch Ness Monster, “Nessie is Gay.”

“Bigfoot is embarrassed and infuriated at this identity theft. He wants to formally apologize to the Loch Ness Monster for any emotional distress this has caused, and reiterate that he has no opinion on the Monster’s sexuality,” a representative from Cryptids & Humanoids Alliance Against Defamation supposedly told the Weekly World News on Bigfoot’s behalf. “Bigfoot’s twitter followers know he would never write such a sophomoric attempt at humor. He asks that twitter find and prosecute this hacker to thefullest extent of the law.”

Is this kind of stuff a colossal waste of time?

Many may think that riding on the coattails of real news events to generate click-throughs is folly. Yet the business plans of organizations like Weekly World News and the Onion tell another story.

While no longer sold at supermarket cash registers, Weekly World News was recently acquired by a private equity firm that sees a solid revenue stream from licensing the rights to silly, other-world characters like Bat Boy and PhD Ape. There’s even an off-Broadway musical about Bat Boy, with high schools and university drama departments paying healthy fees for scripts and lyrics.

The B2B reasons for being on Twitter are compelling.

When BMW wanted to make sure its sporty Cooper Mini was targeted to a young, hip demographic, they arranged for a paid placement in a Weekly World News article about Bat Boy being involved in a high-speed police chase. The humanoid’s car of choice was,of course, a Mini.

Sure, there are plenty of speakers’ bureaus and modeling agencies from which to cull celebrities for trade shows and events. Those who want a supernatural event will send a direct message to @originalbigfoot.

An unfortunate truth is that many kids’ breakfast food choices are based on the appeal of cartoon rabbits, toucans and elephants touting sugary cereals.

But we grow out of that kind of consumerism, right?

Similar marketing seems to be working well on grown men and women. Advertising the solutions to solve some of the human body’s most repulsive maladies now is done with the help of comical animated characters.

Digger, the sharp-clawed enemy of toe nails, spread faster than athlete’s foot when introduced by Novartis as the cartoon personification of its Lamisil brand. I am sure Digger’s face is being used as an avatar by more than a few teens.

Reckitt Benckiser Inc.’s over-the-counter line of expectorants, Mucinex, has a whole family of green phlegm characters to illustrate how fast a booger can move when the right medicine arrives on the scene.

Outside of pharma, the Düsseldorf, Germany, office of BBDO recently introduced a tiny blue cartoon being, in the form of a single calorie, for PepsiCo’s Pepsi Max diet cola. Print ads were posted on the European ad-gallery site adgoodness.com, prompting plenty of controversy over the fact that the calorie commits suicide because it’s lonely. AdAge has since written on the campaign and subsequent outcry from those arguing the issue of suicide is sacrosanct.

I recall one B2B company in the investor relations industry that successfully linked its brand to a cartoonist’s creation. an online database of fund managers and other financial industry contacts, used the image of a baby, dressed in a top hat, throwing around cash. At one memorable conference for the National Investor Relations Institute, Big Dough startled more than a few of normally staid IR officers when it employed a Disneyesque costumed character – a seven-foot-tall baby – to walk around the exhibition hall. Whether the non-traditional marketing approached helped I don’t know, but Big Dough captured plenty of market share among corporate users before being rebranded as part of a larger suite of Ipreo’s services.

I’m guessing we don’t see more B2B businesses tied to fictional characters or cartoon imagery because so much of an organization’s success rides on the credibility and message of the CEO. Marketing officers at B2B firms spend their time making sure the CEO succeeds as chief storyteller and cheerleader for the brand and its heritage.

But given the global crisis of confidence regarding the integrity of executives leading businesses of all sizes, I can’t actually see the downside of making a B2B firm’s CEO sharing the limelight with someone a bit more believable and, yes, fun.  The “Why is Dora Crying?” ad in major newspapers last week was a damn effective way for Viacom to pressure Time Warner to cut a better deal to keep Nick Jr. on its cable systems.

Granted, most specialty chemical companies, makers of superconductors and developers of enterprise accounting software do not have the corporate culture or desire to support borrowing from the consumer marketing toolbox.

But many of the customers and employees of those same conservative organizations privately cheer for the underdog breakout firms who occasionally pop onto the scene and take our breath away because they refuse to conform to conventional wisdom.

Assuming we ever get the steel industry going again in the United States, I’d love to see a fire-breathing dragon conduct the quarterly results conference call.

Jay Richardson views The Big Bopper

Chantilly means something different to just about everyone. To my wife, a talented baker, it’s the whipped Chantilly cream she serves atop her pecan pie. Those who rely on Pepperidge Farm to cook up their desserts will know the Chantilly brand of raspberry cookie.

Then there’s the French city of Chantilly, a section of Fairfax County, Virginia, named Chantilly, and even a small neighborhood bearing that name in the city of Charlotte, N.C.

The strongest imagery for me involves The Big Bopper’s 1958 rock and roll hit Chantilly Lace, which has since been covered by dozens of bands. The opening line, “Hello, baby!” is arguably one of the most recognizable lines in rock.

The Big Bopper, aka Jiles Perry Richardson Jr., and two other young pop superstars, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, were killed in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, an event memorialized as “the day the music died” in Don McLean’s balled American Pie.

Leaping ahead nearly 50 years, a marketer with the appetite for publicity and the stomach for controversy has the opportunity to become a hero to The Big Bopper’s son, Jay Richardson, and the sponsor of a rock concert to keep his dad’s musical memory alive.

What’s the catch? Only the fact that Jay Richardson has decided the only way to fund his dream is to sell The Big Bopper’s used coffin. And he plans to do it via an eBay auction.

Jay Richardson, 49, has owned the 16-gauge steel casket since last year, when it was exhumed from Forest Lawn Cemetery in Beaumont, Texas, which just erected a large statue and memorial to the Big Bopper. The re-interment into a new casket gave the funeral industry a chance to test the quality of their circa-1950s product which, upon close inspection, stood up to 49 years of muddy entombment with only minor rust spots and lime stains.

Inside, as chronicled by Ron Franscell of the Beaumont Enterprise, “forensic examiners found the Big Bopper’s well-preserved corpse, dressed in a black suit and a blue-and-gray striped tie. He wore socks, but no shoes. Most remarkably, his thick brown hair was still perfectly coiffed in his familiar, 1950s flat-top.”
eBay has been a remarkable vehicle for marketers to acquire the oddest objects, along with plenty of media attention and the associated surge in web traffic:

– Goldenpalace.com, an online casino, paid $28,000 for a partially eaten grilled cheese sandwich auctioned by a woman who claimed an image of the Virgin Mary suddenly appeared on her lunch. In 2006, actor William Shatner sold his kidney stone to GoldenPalace.com during an auction that helped victims of Hurricane Katrina.

– Dr. Pepper Snapple Group earned an avalanche of positive media coverage, including NBC’s Today Show, this past June when it heard a Virginia hairdresser was trying to fund her wedding by auctioning off a bridesmaid spot on eBay. The beverage company and its agency, Ketchum, spent $10,000 and could very well send a celebrity bridesmaid to the April 19, 2009, nuptials.

Will a rusted casket that for nearly 50 years held the remains of The Big Bopper find a home with a familiar brand?  I’m dying to know.