A former cigarette pitchman's lawsuit against tobacco companies is among thousands awaiting trial in Florida.

Food companies from Kraft to Sara Lee Food to H.J. Heinz are trimming their offerings to focus marketing dollars on their higher-margin, best-selling brands.

I have a feeling that people will be talking about Holland Cotter's piece in the Times' Sunday Art section for a while, and not just because he suggests that, with the art marketing swooning on the heels of the financial collapse, artists will have to get day jobs like "van Gogh the preacher [and] Pollock the busboy" once did. The making of art and the marketing of art have become inextricably linked in recent times, Cotter writes, with art schools spitting out "thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They …

The Association of National Advertisers last week released some pretty scary findings about how hard the marketing industry has been hit by the financial meltdown, as Nina M. Lentini reported, yet the bad news keeps getting worse, Rupal Parekh says, with no one predicting a turnaround anytime soon. Unilever CEO Paul Polman "rocked" analysts, he writes, by refusing to provide "inappropriate" forecasts. Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble are renegotiating media contracts. Wal-Mart is laying people off, and Anheuser-Busch is eliminating retainers for its agencies. We may even be seeing less stats about how bad things …

It's tempting to write that at least there's one place where it's still all fun and games out there -- the New York Toy Fair, which opened Sunday at the Jacob Javits Convention Center -- but, alas, that's not the case. "The toy category, usually expected to weather economic downturns better than others, also took a hit and many in the industry worry when their consumers will return," writes Aarthi Sivaraman. To be sure, there's an Obama action figure; a new, electronic Rubik's Cube with touch sensors, and Legos that sport digital cameras and MP3 players. And Soren Torp …

The airline industry cut capacity to adjust to the rising cost of fuel last year. The move made it look "incredibly insightful" when the recession hit, Dan Garton, American Airline's evp of marketing tells Ina Paiva Cordle, because it had already adjusted to the drop in demand before it happened. "Sometimes they say it's better to be lucky than good," he quips. In a Q&A, Garton says that it has taken time for consumers to adjust to new fees for services such as checked bags but that, overall, the programs have been successful and are here to stay. First, …