Dan Neil doesn't think much of Alex Bogusky and John Winsor's new book about advertising. He feels it's short-winded (150 pages of large type), self-serving (why don't marketers realize that the ad guys are the smartest guys in the room?), cliché-ridden (break down silos!) and self-evident (better products tend to sell better, duh). So why even bother excerpting from the review? Well, if for no other reason than to retell the joke that Neal repeats that William Shatner once told on "Saturday Night Live": "'Star Trek' is really popular in Japan," he said, "where it's known as …

Black & Decker and rival Stanley Works are merging in a $4.5 billion deal that puts under one corporate umbrella a number of familiar consumer brands: DeWalt, Kwikset and Price Pfister from 99-year-old Black & Decker, and Mac Tools, Stanley Security Solutions and FatMax from 166-year-old Stanley Works, V. Dion Haynes reports. Black & Decker is best known for its power tools, while Stanley is known for hand tools. The deal, the largest in the consumer products sector this year, calls for combining Black & Decker's KwikSet business with Stanley Works' security business. "The complementary product and market …

Cliff Kuang culls a dozen examples from "New Packaging Design" by Janice Kirkpatrick, which features more than 80 innovative designs from around the world.

Antoinette Alexander takes us on a tour of the new Duane Reade store in New York's Herald Square, calling it "an impressive retail space that is a mecca of convenience for New Yorkers and tourists alike." There's also link to a slide show. The store is one of about 30 in the 250-store chain that has been refurbished to date.

Robert Klara spent a day at the busy National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, where its eight attorneys have one of the "most powerful and influential jobs" in marketing because they "tell brands what they can and cannot say." The NAD's caseload -- 300 complaints or so to investigate -- is up 30% over last year, which itself was a 40% percent jump over 2007. "Brands send their marketers, lawyers and scientists to come with the facts -- and if I can keep the lawyers from shutting them up, we can get somewhere," says NAD …

Speaking of questionable claims, one critic says that Kellogg's bold lettering on its Cocoa Krispies boxes proclaiming that the cereal "helps support your child's IMMUNITY" is worthy of hall-of-fame status in the misleading category, Bruce Horovitz reports. "By their logic, you can spray vitamins on a pile of leaves, and it will boost immunity," says Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. The city of San Francisco last week asked Kellogg's to prove its claim in a letter to the Food and Drug Administration, which has jurisdiction over false or misleading labeling. "I …

It would appear to be bad news for firms that conduct agency reviews, and I'm not sure where this budding trend fits in with last week's story about the growing importance of procurement in the selection process, but Natalie Zmuda has a good piece this morning on how "crowd sourcing" is evolving. Main case in point is that Mtn Dew will hand off marketing duties for a $100 million-plus business, at least temporarily, to whomever the masses determine has submitted the best 12-second clips to www.12seconds.tv outlining their ideas for marketing three new Mtn Dew line extensions. The extensions …

Omar L. Gallaga calls the a phenomenon "going Sega." It's the tendency for tech marketers to redefine themselves as new products come along and obliterate the raison d'etre for their hardware. (When Sega could no longer compete in the game console market, it began to produce games like "Sonic the Hedgehog" for its former rivals.) It happened again last week when Slacker, a music-streaming company, said it would discontinue the G2 portable music device it introduced in late 2007 and stick to streaming its radio-for-a-fee service over iPod, Zune and an increasing number of smart phones for $3.99 a …