Desperate Daily News honchos are pressuring a Manhattan outdoor ad firm to rip down an in-your-face New York Post billboard plastered on a building outside the News' Midtown offices. Within hours of the billboard going up last month, enraged execs at the circulation-challenged paper dispatched deputies to the offices of On The Road Media Group and demanded the removal of the 22-by-66-foot banner.

When ABC broadcasts the 76th annual presentation of the Oscars on Sunday, Feb. 29, the commercials will probably get much more attention than usual. The reason, of course, is the continuing uproar over what took place during the CBS broadcast of Super Bowl XXXVIII on Feb. 1.

After Comcast spent billions acquiring AT&T's cable business and talked up digital broadband nirvana -- bundled services and convergence -- potentially reaching 21 million subscribers, the Philadelphia-based cable company is now setting its sights on content to fill the pipeline. Is content really king in the world of digital video recorders (DVRs), such as TiVo? That system lessens the value of advertising when viewers can zap what pays the bills.

If you want to know where ad spending is heading this year, follow tech and the male libido. Experts expect a big spike in advertising for Viagra-like pharmaceuticals (that already started with Super Bowl spots), for cell phones, for discount retailers and home-improvement stores battling for market share, and for big-box stores that are finally seeing a boom in the DTV market. The experts expect these categories to be the hottest this year:

The Food and Drug Administration is asking the makers of prescription drugs to shun the obfuscation, so to speak, by proposing revisions of its regulations on advertising directly to consumers. The proposals encourage the ads to describe significant risks the drugs may pose in language that is clearer and easier for patients to understand.

Executives at PepsiCo, historically one of the largest and most successful Super Bowl advertisers, are threatening to pull out of next year's Super Bowl if they're not given clear assurances that such an incident won't happen again. "We're very serious about this," PepsiCo spokesman Mark Dollins said.

Who knew that guys getting girlie would be such a boon to business? In the weeks following an episode of the Bravo/NBC hit show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy-in which five gay men, known as the Fab 5, make over a low-maintenance straight man-many businesses whose products are featured have seen a significant sales boost.