But that’s apparently what just happened to Hyundai and Initiative, the agency that handles its digital marketing campaigns.

Here’s the text of an email sent out last week with the subject line “Hyundai–Recent Campaign Scams–PLEASE BE AWARE,” from one Tiffany Nguyen, an assistant planner in Initiative’s Los Angeles office:

Dear Partners,

It has been brought to our attention by a couple of our partners that someone allegedly working for Hyundai, or working at other agencies, has contacted various sites requesting proposals, and have even run a short campaign. As you all know, Initiative is the Agency of Record and ALL digital requests should come from our team. These campaigns and RFPs were not approved by anyone working at Hyundai, Initiative or WMG.

Please be aware of anyone contacting you from an e-mail domain address of ‘Hyundai-inc.com’. If you do happen to receive a request, please notify us immediately.

Thank you!

The Initiative Hyundai Digital team”

Confused? Me too. I’ve asked reps from Initiative–owned by ad conglomerate Interpublic (IPG)–and Hyundai for details, but haven’t heard back. I checked with Tiffany Nguyen as well, but she told me that her “higher ups” were the ones who should be talking to me, and I have yet to hear from them either.

So, wise MediaMemo readers, you tell me: What’s the point in actually purchasing bogus ads for companies you don’t represent? I’ve got some ideas, but would love your input. (Ditto if you’ve got any idea about who the buyer is or where the bogus ads actually ran.) Sound off in comments below, or contact me at peter@allthingsd.com or via the blind tip box here.

In the meantime, I’ve been looking for iconic Hyundai ads and have come up empty. But YouTube tells me that his ad was banned in France.

So says Ad Age, which rooted through the projections made earlier this month by Interpublic (IPG) research czar Bob Coen. That’s a great/grim nugget, because it puts what happened over the past few months–and what will happen in the next few months–in context. So does this table from Coen’s report (click to enlarge):

If you’d like to put even more of a pallor on your week, consider that Coen, like his colleagues at other ad conglomerates, is an optimist compared to prognosticators who work outside the business. Fitch Ratings, for instance, predicts a U.S. ad spending drop of six to nine percent next year.

Which is why the media layoffs that we saw crest at the end of this year are destined to continue in 2009.

Some of them will be at media outlets that still haven’t made the cuts that their peers have gone through, but will soon: My former employers at Forbes, for instance, have yet to consolidate the company’s magazine and Web staff, but when they do in January, they’ll be laying people off. We’re also likely to see cuts at Disney’s (DIS) ABC unit in the near future.

Just as worrisome: The notion that companies that have already made one round of cuts, like Time Warner (TWX), will be back for more once they get a better grip on how ad sales are really performing.

Over the weekend, for instance, the New York Post’s Keith Kelly reported that first quarter revenue at Condé Nast could be down 30 percent, prompting another round of contraction at that publisher. A year ago that would have been laughable. Now it sounds sadly plausible.

It’s now very old news that the online ad market is going to get roughed up next year. But by how much? If you want, you can take a gander at this week’s prognostications from Interpublic (IPG), WPP and Publicis. But online ad sales people I talk to say there really isn’t much point in placing any bets on 2009 until the end of this month.

That’s because ad sales have basically stopped until the end of the holiday season, I’m told.

There are some exceptions: If you want, say, prime placement at Yahoo (YHOO) to promote your blockbuster over the July 4th weekend, you have to pay up now. And Google’s (GOOG) search ads aren’t purchased in advance, anyway. But in general, no one wants to commit money to the Web until they see how they did in December.

That may sound like common sense, but it’s a change from past years, and it’s a story I keep hearing. Latest example: A sales executive from a very, very large online publisher told me he has multiple seven- and eight-figure ad deals hammered out and ready to go. But buyers have walked away and are letting the deals sit for the rest of the month, until they assess their holiday sales.

My ad executive is an optimistic sort (obviously), so he figures they’ll sign the paperwork eventually. But he also assumes that said buyers will try to use this month’s data as a hammer to knock down prices by 10 percent or more. I’ll check back at the end of the month, and see how that optimism is holding up.

Oh, and 2008 was pretty crummy, too: Total U.S. advertising spend increased by…almost nothing, he says. Technically, that’s an increase of 0.1 percent.

For 2009:

Total U.S. advertising: Down 4.5 percent

U.S. advertising: Up five percent–note that this number excludes search.

Overseas advertising: Up 2.7 percent

Total worldwide advertising: Down 0.3 percent

Bear in mind, as The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel points out, that these numbers are more optimistic than Wall Street’s estimates.