It all has to do with getting the brand name out there.

Rita Chang writes that recent reports popping up in the blogosphere have it that Microsoft is looking to create a smart phone that builds on its Zune music player. Makes sense that they're up to something. They didn't acquire Danger -- the handset company behind T-Mobile's Sidekick QWERTY phone -- for nothing, after all.

Credit Suisse analyst Christopher Ceras is predicting a "November slaughter" in overall automotive sales figures when they are released on Tuesday. Unlike downturns in the past, sales of luxury autos in the U.S. -- which include everything from a Lexus to a Lamborghini -- are just as bad as in the mass market, Kate Linebaugh reports. They dropped 30% last month from a year earlier -- on par with the 31.9% decline for the overall market, according to Autodata Corp. Morgan Stanley analysts expect the luxury market will be "significantly worse" in coming months. J.D. Power estimates that sales …

Kai Ryssdal conducted an interesting interview Wednesday evening with Brian Yeagar, who has written a book about craft beers called Red, White and Brew: An American Beer Odyssey. At the end of the piece, Ryssdal mentions that the Big Three, er ... Big Two brewers have ventured into "craft-brew-seeming concoctions" (he had been sampling) of their own. Are they responding wisely to a competitive threat? "I actually think that it may come back to bite them," Yaeger responds. "They might turn on people who are Budweiser die-hards and let them realize that there is …

It's Black Friday. I know because the clock radio seared the fact into my cerebellum with a hokey advertising skit this morning (I can't remember who was advertising what, having hit the snooze button). Of course, we've been seeing headlines and hearing reports about Black Friday for days, and not just in the trade press. Since when did such an inside-baseball term become part of the vernacular? It's as if people other than surgeons were walking around talking about traffic "infarctions" on the way to the mall. Wikipedia is helpful, as always, and hopefully reliable on this one. …

Happy Thanksgiving. We'll be back on the beat on Friday.

The appointment to head a special economic advisory board with 8 to 16 additional members is expected later today. The group will provide the new administration with outside advice on dealing with the nation's financial crisis.

EBay is offering a new program called Large Merchant Services to help large merchants sell thousands of fixed-price products, Andrea James reports. The service competes with Amazon's professional merchant services. Still in beta, the service "provides an efficient way to process large numbers of transactions within the eBay Trading Platform." It also offers inventory management based on SKU numbers.

"Have I no self-restraint?" I ask myself as I type and watch myself get sucked deeper into the maw that is the Annual Super Bowl Ad Watch. "You've already indecently run at least one, maybe two, stories about this. When does it end?" Better yet, when does it begin? Because, like the holiday music that's piped into the gym, it seems to be earlier and earlier every year. In any event, here's what you need to know, and it's all in the lede of an Associated Press story: "Most advertising slots for the 2009 Super Bowl that weren't sold …