Next Obnoxious Ad Venue: Out-of-Office Email Messages?

Does anyone out there actually read people's out-of-office email auto-replies? Well, don't start, because some jerk is trying to repurpose them as advertising space. Ad executives in Sweden see potential in this obnoxious scheme. Production company B-Reel agreed to be the guinea pigs, paying to be namedropped in Saatchi & Saatchi art director Gustav Egerstedt's out-of-office message. The Saatchi team envision bigger things, though. "It will be a very simple service, a website, where a person says, 'I'll be out of the office for this period of time, I'm in this kind of business, would you like to buy my message?' " says Petter Dixelius of Saatchi Stockholm.