Steven Strubbe, associate brand manager and digital lead at Kimberly-Clark's Huggies brand, said in this interview that Huggies started leveraging Tumblr about a year and a half ago to promote Huggies Little Movers Diapers.

Kraft Foods Inc. expects earnings to rise at least 9% this year even as it prunes its portfolio of North American brands. The Northfield, Ill.-based company, which will separate into two companies later this year, forecast 2012 net revenue growth of about 5%, including a hit of up to one percentage point from "product pruning" in North America.

Jeremy Lin hasn't done any marketing yet, but the sports-endorsement world is at the feet of the 23-year-old Asian-American pro basketball player.

Mark Fields, president of Ford's Americas division, is the odds-on favorite within the automaker to succeed Alan Mulally as its chief executive. And with North America as the source of virtually all of Ford's profits for the foreseeable future, Fields is being pushed to deliver better margins, higher sales and the final validation that he is the best choice to take over when Mulally retires.

Barclays Bank has unleashed Pingit, an iOS, Android and BlackBerry app that allows people to send up to £300 ($470) each day to family and friends (or as the wags at Engadget put it, technically-aware muggers.) Users just have to come up with a five-digit code that will lock the app to everyone but themselves.

Four designers want to make Chattanooga, Tenn. the poster child for municipal branding in America, with Chatype, a a fresh typeface inspired by both the city’s industrial past and its arts-minded future. They hope to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter to fund the project. (With two weeks left in their campaign, they’re about two-thirds of the way there.)

Collecting such data as location-based info and product choice of an initial purchase, the predictive analytics at Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com, can calculate precisely just how much people will spend over the course of their tenure as Diapers.com customers. The company's business is built upon getting moms and dads hooked on cheaper buys (rash ointment, formula) to build customer rapport that could translate to purchases of higher end goods (car seats, baby swings), conveniently shipped in the same box. This strategy has been working  -- by its fourth year, revenue at Diapers.com had grown to $181 million.

While automakers are thinking of ways to make cars more like rolling social-media nodes, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) wants automakers to simplify dashboards, not make them more complex.  Their goal is limiting the amount of time when drivers take their eyes off the road and their hands off the wheel. Under guidelines issued Thursday, the Department of Transportation also proposed that automakers disable time-consuming functions, such as text messaging or Web browsing, unless the car is parked. NHTSA drew heavily on recommendations drafted by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. Under NHTSA's guidelines, automakers would reduce the length, …

Pintrest, the digital vision board for social photo sharing, is hot. ComScore found that Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, who spend an average of 98 minutes a month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook.  Pinterest has been around since 2008, but it took a while to build critical mass. One expert, Dr. Christopher Long, a professor at Ouachita Baptist University, points out that Pinterest, like Facebook, relies on people generating content that interests other users, so once a critical mass of people comment and re-pin, it reinforces others …

Blue-collar workers are getting their SAG cards, as workers -- especially those working on U.S.-made products  -- are again becoming a favorite subject in national ads. “We continue to see very heavy emotional response to anything that would leverage against the bad economy,”  Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, tells Stuart Elliott. Super Bowl ads were prime examples of this trend: General Electric's “G.E. works” campaign celebrated products like refrigerators being built in the U.S.;  a spot for Hyundai starred workers  at its first American factory, in Montgomery, Ala. And of course there was Chrysler's Clint-Eastwood-narrated "Halftime in America," whose …