Ellen Byron breaks the story that the Procter & Gamble board will approve the appointment of COO Robert McDonald, 55, as CEO today, replacing A.G. Lafley, 61, whose tenure stretches back to June 2000. Lafley, who is widely credited with revitalizing P&G, will remain chairman of the company. The moves, which a P&G spokeswoman would not confirm, will reportedly take place on July 1. McDonald will have to guide a recent strategy at odds with the time-tested secret of P&G's success, Byron points out. The recession is testing its traditional approach of convincing consumers to pay more …

Nescafe has launched a cheeky and aggressive outdoor campaign in two test markets for Starbucks' instant coffee, Via, that points out a considerable difference in the price of the new brand and its Taster's Choice. The ads strongly resemble those of Starbucks, Emily Bryson York reports. "Starbucks makes great instant. We make great instant. So why does theirs cost 400% more?" the copy reads in a Chicago subway car. The last piece of the multi-paneled ad says that Nescafe's Taster's Choice is "the smart choice." TastersChoice.com, meanwhile, asserts, "Good coffee is not expensive," offering a budget calculator and …

Chief marketing officers have always crunched numbers, Todd Wasserman reports, but the prevailing sentiment among observers of such things is that the job is getting more wonky. It's a noticeable departure from the CMO of lore, whose talent lay in dreaming up big ideas and commissioning multimillion-dollar TV campaigns. "It used to be MadMen, but now it's Revenge of the Nerds," Tom Kline, chief scientist for the marketing firm Digital Scientists, tells Wasserman. Or, as Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade Marketing and founder of thecmoclub.com, says, "The CMO has evolved from Chief Miracle Officer to Chief Minutia Officer." …

The third-generation Prius that's rolling out in the U.S. is not just for "some special people," Wahei Hirai, Toyota's managing officer for design, tells Blaine Harden, who reports from Toyota City, Japan. "This is a mainstream car." Toyota executives are careful to point out that they are not "forsaking" environmentalists, but as one spokesman put it, "the objective of the Prius is to get the family to the mall, not to see how far you can go on so many drops of gas." It's more powerful than its predecessors, has more headroom, a bigger trunk, better gas mileage and …

Echoing a lot of live bloggers and twitterers yesterday, columnist Troy Wolverton feels that Apple's new-product announcements at its Worldwide Developers Conference were underwhelming, and lacked the "one more thing" moment that Steve Jobs was famous for in his presentations. Much of what was announced, he and others point out, has been bandied about the blogosphere for some time. Wolverton also lists some disappointments about what Apple didn't announce -- the ability to run multiple apps at the same time on iPhones; confirmation of the rumored development of a touch-screen netbook. Still, Wolverton writes, the company …

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's order delaying the finalization of the planned Chrysler-Fiat "might be the equivalent of a television time-out in the last 30 seconds of a basketball game," Greg Gardner writes.

"You have to give JWT credit for trying to hang the financial crisis around Google's neck," writes Dan Neil. "Still, why stop there? Why not blame Google for swine flu, man boobs, mercury in tuna, Spencer and Heidi?"

Would you believe that there's a real campaign out there for Redneck Bank: "Where bankin's funner!"? It's for the newly renamed online division of Bank of the Wichitas. http://www.redneckbank.com/ Louise Story reports on this and other marketing efforts to burnish the image of banks and banking.