French holding company Bollore has taken a four to five percent stake in advertising group Havas, Bollore confirmed on Friday. "The group has taken between four and five percent but has less than five percent," a company spokesman said, confirming an earlier newspaper report.

The Democratic Party is planning a $100 million advertising campaign in support of John F. Kerry, employing novel tactics to enable its presidential nominee to husband limited resources for use in the fall campaign against President Bush, party officials said Thursday.

Viacom Inc. on Thursday said the president of its Paramount Enterprises operation would leave the company and said it would reorganize some operations under newly appointed co-president Tom Freston.

The Federal Trade Commission receives about 300,000 samples of deceptive spam - forwarded by computer users - each day, and stores it in a database. The FTC and its law enforcement partners use the database to generate cases against people who use spam to spread false or misleading information about their products or services. To better handle the high volume of spam forwarded to the database, the FTC recently opened a new email box - SPAM@UCE.GOV. The old email address (uce@ftc.gov) will be phased out.

As America's seemingly insatiable appetite for reality television continues, so does Madison Avenue's use of reality-style advertising and promotions as a way to grab consumer's attention.

A group of progressive media activists covering the Democratic National Convention in Boston plans to launch a new television network to counter the conservative news coverage they see on Fox News and CNN.

Domestic diva Martha Stewart isn't letting a little thing like being convicted get in the way of her influencing the company she founded.

Shares of Comcast Corp., the biggest cable operator, fell more than 4 percent Wednesday after the company posted its second-quarter earnings report. The company's stock fell $1.18, or 4.1 percent, to $27.56. Comcast said it had second quarter net income of $262 million, or 12 cents a share, on revenue of $5.07 billion.

About 200 readers have complained to the Los Angeles Times for running a full-page ad on July 23 from Exodus, an antigay group that claims to "cure" its members of being gay or lesbian, as reported by Times columnist Steve Lopez on Wednesday.

First there was the battle of the network TV tycoons. Then came rival shows with migratory moms and dueling plans for prime-time prize fighters. Now the reality TV wars are moving into the nursery.