If you’re lucky, you can get the press to do some marketing for you. And if you’re really lucky, you can get Apple (AAPL) to do your marketing for you.

The newest set of Apple ads focuses on apps made by big brands–Barnes & Noble, Pizza Hut, Gap, Epicurious and Zagat–that can certainly afford their own promotional pushes.

And certainly those guys paid cash or some other kind of compensation for the consideration, right? Not as far as Advertising Age can discern: The trade mag notes with a bit of dismay that there isn’t any kind of application process to get into Apple commercials and that “the marketers in question didn’t request to be in the commercial at all.”

As far as I can tell, this mirrors Apple’s overall policy for iTunes, whether you’re talking about music, movies or apps: Unlike traditional retailers or even competitors like Amazon (AMZN), there’s no way to buy shelf space at Apple’s digital store. If you want Apple to shine a spotlight on your stuff, you just have to hope that someone there likes your stuff. AdAge:

Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the story, but it’s clear the company looks for apps that use as many aspects of the iPhone as possible, such as sound, shaking, GPS or the camera. It also seemed to favor anything that highlights features of the newest operating system, such as in-app payment. Additionally, it appears that brands are given more credit for good user experience than whether or not they can match Apple’s own cool factor.

Pizza Hut, for instance, doesn’t have many common associations with the tech giant but its app was the first from the quick-service industry that let users place delivery orders.

*Note that Apple’s app ecosystem has grown faster than its ad agency expected; the new campaigns announce that there are 75,000 apps, but that number is 10,000 short, according to a release Cupertino put out yesterday.

Last week, Microsoft was roundly praised for the way it structured its Yahoo deal. And today, the company seems to have struck a smart pact with Publicis, which will pay $530 million for Redmond’s Razorfish digital ad agency, which Ballmer never wanted anyway. And the French ad giant will agree to buy a certain amount of search and display inventory from Microsoft over the next five years.

The devil is in the details and we won’t know many of those until regulators sign off on the pact. And even then, we may not get the answer to two big questions: How much will Publicis actually be required to spend on Bing? And what are the penalties if it doesn’t fulfill the minimum?

But at first blush, it looks as though Microsoft (MSFT) managed to get out of a business it never wanted to be in in the first place–it acquired Razorfish as part of a $6 billion deal for aQuantive in 2007, and what it was interested in then was aQuantive’s ad-serving technology. And it may be able to force some dollars through its newly augmented Bing search engine.

That doesn’t guarantee that Web searchers will actually use Bing/Yahoo (YHOO), of course. Current estimates put the combined engines’ reach at 28 percent, and Google (GOOG) has just about everything else. One way to bump that up could be to dangle a big wad of cash–perhaps with the money Microsoft just made by dumping Razorfish–in front of News Corp. (NWS) and Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL, both of which have search deals with Google that expire in the next year or so.

Now Razorfish is formally on the block: The Financial Times reports that Microsoft (MSFT) has hired Morgan Stanley to hawk the agency and suggests that French ad conglomerate Publicis Groupe could be a buyer. Then again, so could every other big ad holding company, including Omnicom (OMC) and WPP (WPPGY).

The FT throws out a value of $600-$700 million for Razorfish, down from the $800 million price tag that AdAge put on the shop last summer, which was the last time sales chatter heated up. At the time, the buyer was supposed to be WPP. Microsoft paid $6 billion for all of aQuantive in 2007.

Why has everyone been so convinced that Microsoft would sell something it bought in 2007? Because everyone thought that Microsoft never wanted Razorfish–it wanted the rest of aQuantive’s ad network business. And presumably what it really wanted was Doubleclick’s ad network business, but Google (GOOG) beat it out on that deal. Yahoo (YHOO) had already bought RightMedia and WPP bought 24/7 Real Media. (Boy, a lot of money was spent on ad networks back then! And not coincidentally, a flood of ad network start-ups flooded the market shortly after those transactions went through.)

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own people have never tried particularly hard to argue that the company was committed to owning an ad agency. Though they did try to argue that owning one wasn’t a conflict with the online publishing business it keeps burning money on. Now that won’t be a problem.

[Image credit: g-hat]

Everything about the newest ad gambit is parallel to the earlier one: It’s run via Web ad agency/network Federated Media, and consists of a page that Twitter endorses and will promote on its site.

And just like the ExecTweet page, most Twitter users won’t see Twitter’s promotions since most Twitter usage happens away from Twitter.com. And just like ExecTweets, March Tweetness is a collection of themed Tweets that you could find on your own, using Twitter’s handy search function, which it paid $15 million for last year.

But this one looks marginally more useful to me: Unlike ExecTweets, there is a rhyme and reason to collecting Tweets tied to specific events–in this case, different games during college basketball’s March Madness tournament. One of Twitter’s most compelling features, after all, is its ability to deliver snippets of thoughts, in real time, so I could see people actually using this one.

It’s no surprise, obviously, that financial advertising has slowed down in the first three quarters of 2008. The surprise is that it’s only been a 10 percent reduction (so far), according to Nielsen.

There are also some interesting breakdowns: Mortgage and loan companies spent 62 percent less (of course). But credit service companies increased their spend by 22 percent, and investment service companies boosted their spend by six percent.

Here’s Nielsen’s list of top 10 financial advertisers (click chart to enlarge): Note that Bank Of America (BAC), one of the comparative winners during the meltdown, has cut its spend by 30 percent so far this year–slightly more than teetering Citigroup’s (C) 26.5 percent cut. Previously left-for-dead ETrade (ETFC), meanwhile, bumped up its spend by 24.5 percent.

Want more unpleasantness? OK. Comes now yet another ad executive to tell you that next year will be very unpleasant for anyone looking to make a living off of advertising revenue.

U.S. advertising spending will drop 5-8 percent next year, says Steve Lanzano, chief operating officer of MPG North America, a unit of French advertising conglomerate Havas SA. Lanzano predicts that sports advertising, long considered one of the most impervious to downturns, will get roughed up as well:

Even television sports, which have become more popular with advertisers since audiences tend to watch the events live rather than recording them, will suffer from the broad pullback in marketing spending, said Lanzano.

Lanzano estimated 9 to 10 percent of spending on broadcast sports comes from financial services and automotive, both industries that have been in turmoil. ‘That’s a lot of money moving out,’ said Lanzano.

‘Because of the hits in the categories that support sports–whether it’s financial or automotive or retail–I think they might take a little more of a hit than they would in other recessionary periods,’ he said.”

OK. Let’s break the glumness up a bit, shall we? If you’re looking for a cheap laugh, head to the Hollywood Reporter’s take on the Nielsen numbers. Then feast your eyes on the unintentional, yet very successful contextual advertising placed to the right of the story (which is where I borrowed the image currently at the top of this story).