"THE ULTIMATE TEST MARKET" -- We thought hard and long before advancing today's thesis. For one thing, it's not exactly politically correct given current events.

HEINEKEN, THE NEW GATORADE -- It's become almost a cliché on Madison Avenue to see some performance enhancing beverage juxtaposed against images of sweaty athletes engaged in world class sports competitions, but who would have imagined extending that metaphor a beverage that is consumed primarily for its, well, performance-dulling effects. The creative team at improbably named ad agency named StrawberryFrog, of course.

EXTREME WEATHER, ROSY FORECAST -- As tragic as they are in terms of their human toll, natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and last year's Asian tsunami apparently do not appear to have negatively impacted the advertising business the way many might have expected they would. At least that's what the media economists at Carat seem to suggest in their revised U.

FICKLED FINGER POINTERS OF FACTS -- An interesting debate has been taking place within the electronic pages of a spunky little e-mail newsletter called Television Business Report. Normally, we don't pay much heed to the multitude of electronic newsletters that flood our inbox--imagine that?--and frankly, we're not sure how we even got on the list for some of these.

THE 43RD MARKET - When Nielsen Media Research released its new TV universe estimates last week, there was a lot of jostling among media markets, reflecting the steady migration of the U.S.