More news from the airline industry advertising front. We just saw Air New Zealand buy up some ad space on bald heads, and now on the other side of things, Spirit Airlines will be selling ad space on their overhead bins.

Yep, the old “reaching a captive audience” creed of advertisers everywhere is coming back to haunt air travelers everywhere. We’ve already seen pizza ads on the ground below busy flight routes and ads on tray tables.

No news if Spirit’s marketing folks (you know the ones who brought us the MILF Airfare Sale, the WTF Airfare Sale, and other such exercises in subtlety) will have any say on which ads will be placed on the overhead compartments.

I can’t help but feel Don Draper and the characters of Mad Men would be very disappointed by this move.

A friend and I have been “collecting” emails from Spirit Airlines, to see which of their advertisements comes closest to being NSFW.

So many candidates.

Let’s see, there was the one that said, “We’re proud of our Double-D’s” (deep discounts). Then there was the campaign called “MILF Sale” (many islands, low fares — riiiiiight). Oh let’s not forget the “T & A” ad, and the one that made clever use of the word, “brazilian”.

Kind of funny to picture all these suits sitting around, cackling over how cool they are.

The Nixon tapes never had anything quite like THIS smoking gun; a communication that leaps out and says GOTCHA!

But Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza had his gotcha moment earlier this week, when bloggers (including Alex Rudloff, Chris Elliott and fine folks at Gadling) released email correspondence involving an unhappy Spirit passenger, and Mr. CEO’s incredible LET THEM EAT CAKE response, as follows:

“…we owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.”

Atta boy, thats how to win the hearts and minds of your customers!

What a ding-dong.