In addition to significantly reducing the sugar content in its mass-market cereals such as Lucky Charms, General Mills hopes to appeal to the niches with highly targeted advertising, particularly online, and with offerings such as gluten-free products, svp and CMO Mark Addicks tells Melanie Wells in a Q&A. Wells mentions that GM seems to be targeting men more than it had been with products such as Wheaties Fuel and wonders if this is part of a larger strategy. "You're going to see much more focused targeting and not just men and women but you'll see "millennials" (consumers aged 18 …

Black Is the New Green: Marketing to Affluent African Americans, a book by Leonard Burnett Jr. and Andrea Hoffman scheduled for publication in March, makes the case that most marketers are missing out on a lucrative market of 340,000-plus African-American households with more than $150,000 in annual income each and a collective $87 billion in disposable income, Mark Dolliver reports. Even those brands that have identified the market have not done a good job of appealing to it, Burnett and Hoffman say. What was Gucci thinking, for example, in featuring the 18-year-old Rihanna in a campaign? A more …

Jim Lentz, Toyota Motor Sales USA's president-COO, started off yesterday denying to Matt Lauer on the "Today" show that the company had dragged its feet on recalling cars with possibly defective accelerator pedals, then he popped up in a video on the automaker's Facebook page talking about what Brand Republic's headline this morning dubs the company's $7 billion "Worldwide Brand Debacle." "It's a strong, straightforward offensive with Mr. Lentz striking an apologetic but reassuring tone," Rich Thomaselli write. On Sunday, a full-page ad featuring a pause button appeared in 20 of …

In a move sure to delight defenders of the first-amendment right to regional dialect everywhere, the National Football League isn't claiming that it owns exclusive rights to the phrase "Who Dat?" after all, Jaquetta White reports. But it does invoke trademark ownership when the phrase and the New Orleans Saints' fleur-de-lis logo are used on products that that use "other trademarks or identifiers of the Saints." " 'Who Dat' we do not claim to own by itself," says NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy. "It's when 'Who Dat' is used in conjunction with Saints marks that it's a problem." McCarthy …

Pharmaceutical advertisers are toning down the sexual innuendo in erectile dysfunction ads and adding more safety warnings to products like Chantix quit-smoking treatment and Plavix blood thinner as the Food and Drug Administration increases its scrutiny of promotional campaigns for medicines, Sharon Pettypiece reports. The FDA has increased the number of people monitoring ads by 50% to 60 staffers over the last five years, according to Thomas Abrams, director of the Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising, and Communications. "Our standards haven't changed, but we are trying to do a better job at reaching the industry," Abrams says. …