McDonald's is promoting its new Fruit & Walnut Salad by enticing African-American women to engage with rich media ad units. The six-week campaign was designed by digital marketing agency ImagineThat in conjunction with McDonald's multicultural marketing agency, Burrell, a unit of Publicis. Spend wasn't disclosed.

Scientists are scanning brain activity in the hopes of catching sight of the physical mechanisms that determine whether you prefer Coke over Pepsi. The nascent research, known as "neuromarketing," could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes.

Google launched Google Print last week in beta form, which matches books to users' search terms and includes links to online booksellers sites. The Mountain View, CA, search giant's venture with book publishers and libraries -- also touted as an advertising opportunity for book publishers -- works this way: On the search engine's "Google Print" home page, users enter a search term.

If you want to be a marketing manager in the Internet world, consider getting a doctorate in mathematics. That's because advertising on the Internet involves millions of keywords, billions of Web pages, and millions of irrational and ephemeral surfing patterns conducted by millions of people.

Network computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. is getting a little help from its friends in a new $50 million advertising campaign to bring its brand out of the dark. In its biggest brand overhaul, Sun's advertising incorporates such clients as online auctioneer eBay Inc, automaker General Motors and Major League Baseball to illustrate how its products and services help connect people across businesses and personal interests.

Nike has a message for shoppers looking for the hottest shoe design: Just do it -- yourself. The world's largest athletic shoemaker has relaunched a Web site where shoppers design their own shoes, choosing everything from the color of the famous Nike swoosh to personalizing the tongue with a word or phrase.

It's like Tivo for radio, but is it legal? Various devices that enable listeners to record Internet radio streams and then convert them into MP3 files are catching on and making Web radio and streaming services more appealing to the general public. But some legal experts say the recording software may violate digital copyright laws and does little more than promote piracy.

Microsoft's new Xbox 360 console game system has been engineered to accommodate and advance advergaming concepts as never before and its global audience of gamers will be sold aggressively to marketers when the product hits the stores this fall, according to the company.

Friendster Inc. CEO Scott Sassa's resignation from the once uber-trendy social networking start-up doesn't spell the end of the nascent industry, but it does highlight the difficulty in turning a hot site into a hot business, analysts said on Thursday.

There was a time when high costs ensured that cell phones were only used by people out of the range of a fixed-line phone. These days, however, with wireless calls averaging just a few cents a minute, mobile conversations occur nearly as often from the comfort of the home as from the road. For many, the only tethers to the wired world are the twin fears of dropped calls and running out of minutes. Now, mobile-phone manufacturers are looking to add another feature that could prompt customers to ditch their land lines. A new generation of handsets will allow people …