While media monitors ogle TV ad spending like Bob Dole on Britney, important international campaigns are being delivered without a TV component.

In the US, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami launched the BMW Mini sans spots, instead favoring a jazzed-up Web site, print, and outdoor work and onsite media stunts around the USA, working with an estimated budget of $20 million US (see Interactive Report, pg. 33). Meanwhile, Amsterdam's KesselsKramer launched global campaigns for both Diesel and Oxfam with nary a televised branding moment to be seen.

Oxfam's Fair Trade campaign saw shipping containers bearing fair trade messages used as movable billboards, scattered guerilla-style in central locations of such key cities as Hong Kong, Washington and London, complete with Internet broadcasts. Diesel on the other hand, centers on print and outdoor ads starring Donald Diesel, a twisted Teletubby-meets-Richard D. James. Donald cavorts with sassy youths through ultra glossy surreal environments, their emotional connotations now sponsored by the ubiquitously weird-yet-funky clothier. A similar Web site offers prizes for intrepid visitors who wade through the site's amusing yet unsettling fare. David Bell, creative director on both campaigns, explains that neither client required a tube-free approach.

"The answer is specific to each. Oxfam is a big international quite corporate charity and we wanted more of an underground movement feel. So we used non-traditional media," says Bell. "As for Diesel, TV is not out of the loop, but it seems like they have their central Diesel countries where press, poster and store windows have more impact and reach than TV at the moment. But they haven't killed TV."

When asked about creating global campaigns the KesselsKramer way, Bell says the key is avoiding global advertising. "That's where it all goes wrong. Not to point a finger at other agencies, but global ads seem to be defined as making bland ads to please everyone all the time. Diesel only tries to please the Diesel audience and is led more by instinct than by market research. It's like the PlayStation stuff, they carve their own little niche, follow that and fuck everyone else. Usually gut instinct works."

But back to the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink and TV trend.

The US Mini launch may not have rolled out during Friends, but the site contains several extremely spot-like short films directed by Harvest commercial director Baker Smith.

Similarly, Danny Kleinman directed the extremely slick viral spot "Champagne," the first wave of the European launch of Microsoft's Xbox (see Clientology, pg. 16).

While many of the brands adopting the above approach are on the "edgier" side of the tracks or are being launched, don't think bread-and-butter clients aren't edging this way.

Unilever has a pilot project underway to determine if online 30-second spots are a plausible replacement for the almost universally ignored banner ad. A new Salon Selectives campaign should begin delighting (or perhaps greatly annoying) the broadband-enabled this month. If it proves successful (and due to its point-of-broadcast, quantifiably so), some of the billions Unilever spends on TV for its near 1,000 brands may well follow suit, resulting in greater international penetration at a fraction of the media cost.

Online spots, either anchored to a page or emailed to you by your brother-in-law, are perhaps the most readily-flowing interactive teat on which today's commercial industry may come to suckle.