The "kookiest" idea among more traditional ones like belts and wallets to extend the futuristic Nooka watch brand, blogs Cliff Kuang, is to create a fragrance that summons the smell of watchbands and quartz with "top notes meant to evoke electricity." Matthew Waldman, a moonlighting branding and interactive designer, started Nooka in 2004 around the idea of telling time as a linear graph. The intent of the new fragrance is to "hark back" to the "glam future" of 1960s and 1970s. "Futurism used to be optimistic, not terrifying, like in 'Independence Day,'" [No. 12 on the list …

VST points out that coming attractions are part of the magic of going to the movies, and indeed that's true. What other marketing genre can claim such hallowed ground? IFC has put together a list of its favorite trailers -- another term used for the unique combination of art and commerce -- of all time, as well as a brief history of the medium. Indeed, the previews, once upon a time, followed the feature. "The documentary 'Coming Attractions' dates the very first trailer to a 1912 Edison serial titled 'What Happened to Mary?' …

New York's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, has informed Charles Schwab & Co. that it plans to sue the company for civil fraud over its marketing and sales of auction-rate securities, Liz Rappaport reports. In a letter to the brokerage sent Friday, Cuomo says that his office would be open to a settlement, but Schwab must agree to buy back the securities from investors still stuck with them. Auction-rate securities are short-term debt instruments whose prices reset in periodic auctions. Cuomo charges that Schwab's brokers had little idea of what they were selling and later failed to tell clients that …

Hyundai may have been the first marketer to offer assurance to skittish consumers worried that they might not be able to pay for a purchase but its Super Bowl "Assurance" spot has been mimicked by many other companies that essentially offer consumers insurance for closing the deal, Elaine Wong reports. In fact, Hyundai has tracked about 100 similar offers across the marketing universe. Hewlett-Packard last week began to offer buyers a check if its printing solutions don't deliver the recommended cost savings in a year, for example. And Sears recently launched a "Buyer Protection Program" that lets consumers who …

Wal-Mart calls it the "cost-supplement initiative"; Jack Neff calls it "probably the boldest retailer grab for suppliers' consumer-marketing funds ever." What it boils down to is Wal-Mart requiring marketers to funnel more dollars -- not just from their trade promotion budgets but also from their consumer advertising funds -- into co-branded Wal-Mart ads in various media. The sword hanging over marketers who balk is losing shelf space or delisting. But complying with Wal-Mart's guidelines means, in theory, that Procter & Gamble would need to divert around $1 billion into its media budget or marketing. In the unlikely event that it …