Ford's marketing campaign for 2011 Mustangs will target younger buyers and women with a heavy dose of social media and Internet marketing, Brent Snavely reports. It also plans to heavily market Mustang's V6 engine rather than the V8 and tout fuel efficiency, says Steve Ling, Ford's North American car marketing manager. The 3.7-liter V-6 gets 31 miles per gallon on the highway, which "really opens Mustang up to a broader audience," according to Ling. "We're feeling very good about where the Mustang sales are going to be." A TV spot will include an appearance by a …

Although female-run businesses grew two times faster than businesses as a whole, according to a 2008 report from the National Association of Women Business Owners, only 3% of all venture capital funds go to women, according to Babson College research. Kimberly-Clark sees an opportunity in the disparity and has launched HuggiesMomInspired.com that will provide up to $15,000 in grants to entrepreneurial moms, Elaine Wong reports. MomInspired is being promoted in ads and links on the Huggies homepage, as well as through partnerships with influencers like Maria Bailey, owner of BSM Media, monthly contributor to MediaPost's …

Surprisingly, few marketers have followed the lead of Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble in compensating agencies based on the value they add to projects rather than the time they spend on them, according to a survey by the Association of National Advertisers. Jeremy Mullman reports that value-based fees account for less than 1% of pay agreements. "This is one of those times when there's a lot of talk and very little progress," says Mike Lescarbeau, CEO at Interpublic's Carmichael Lynch. "It's difficult to have it be a shared risk." Fee-based models hit 75% this year, up …

Following Johnson & Johnson's voluntary recall of popular medicines such as Tylenol, Benadryl and Zyrtec, Natasha Singer writes that many parents were questioning whether being a brand-name drug is really synonymous with quality. "Another recall for baby Tylenol!" tweeted Kevin Kowalski, a representative father in Illinois, yesterday. "Well, then no more baby Tylenol, back to generic brand." Besides social media, Singer reports that the topic was also a flashpoint on playgrounds and at birthday parties over the weekend, with some people complaining that they had difficulty obtaining information from the company. McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a unit of …

It was years in the making, and left a jilted a suitor stewing, but UAL's United Airlines and Continental Airlines this morning announced that they are joining together through a stock swap valued at $3 billion to form the world's largest carrier in terms of passengers carried, Mary Jane Credeur and Mary Schlangenstein report. The airline will operate under the United name from its Chicago headquarters, but aircraft will fly the Continental logo and colors. "This is what happens in a merger of equals," says Continental's CEO Jeff Smisek, 55, who will run the airline as CEO …