With the nation's financial system teetering on the verge of collapse, this might not be the most propitious time for any segment of it to run a marketing campaign that’s out-and-out weird. Still, consumers will enjoy an online effort for the Credit Unions of Washington that features the random philosophizings of actor Carl Weathers (best known as Apollo Creed from the Rocky movies). Pedaling around on a bicycle that’s got a flower garden attached to its front, Weathers offers the locals oddball observations on this and that, as when he compliments one young woman on her new shoes by remarking that “in 1903, a woman named Marie Curie put on a new pair of shoes and won the Nobel Prize in physics.” Ah, so that’s how it happened! Big Bang Electrical of Seattle developed the campaign.

—Posted by Mark Dolliver