It is something that rapidly paced headline-chasing and five-second storytelling do not lend themselves to in an interactive digital broadband world. But the media and entertainment industries sorely need it right now.

Two's company but three's a crowd, or so they say. But a crowd may not be such a bad thing when it comes to the tricky task of drawing attention to an advertising campaign. More marketers seeking to stand out amid the commercial clutter are crowding their campaigns with ensemble casts, rather than relying on an actor or two. The members of the ensembles continue from one commercial, print ad or poster to another, just as if they were the regular cast of a television series.

Serious fans of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" will find nothing new on an upcoming DVD release of the show's first two episodes from 1997. Priced at just $9.98, this TV starter set is being released tomorrow as a marketing gambit by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment to attract new customers - a kind of Buffy for beginners.

In the introduction to his 1963 best-seller, "Confessions of an Advertising Man," David Ogilvy apologized for writing "in the old-fashioned first person singular." In the intervening decades?the years of, among others, Madonna and Donald Trump?that modest impulse has faded. The inclination now is more toward emphatic self-promotion. Linda Kaplan Thaler, who today enjoys an Ogilvy-like reputation as one of advertising's creative talents, co-wrote a book on marketing in 2003, and advised her peers, "Don't worry about whether the news is good or bad. Just get covered. . . . PR breeds PR."

Advertisers hate buying 30-second commercials on broadcast networks, but do it anyway. How can cable networks change their (agencies') behavior?

He finally got the job he coveted: chief executive of Walt Disney. But Michael Eisner's successor?the man who must turn things around at the Mouse House?is unproven as a strategist.

Already steeped in testosterone, the newsstand last year became even more muscular, with new launches targeting specific male archetypes: men who love gadgets and fashion, men who love music and men who love&themselves. And while such new books--Condé Nast's Cargo, the independent Giant and Ziff Davis Media's Sync--have tried to stand out from their general-interest brethren, single-copy sales have been a tough challenge with sell-through averages ranging from single digits to high teens. Now, to remedy this, as well as to surely help boost advertising, all three are tweaking their editorial formulas.

When Viacom acquired CBS in 1999, one expectation was that the company would be able to sell packages of advertising across an expanded range of properties: billboards, radio stations, cable channels like MTV and, of course, the CBS network.

Six days after surprising Wall Street with word that it would delay reporting its 2004 results, the Interpublic Group of Companies revealed even more unpleasant news about its finances yesterday.

David Hill, chairman and CEO of Fox Sports, has been appointed president of the new DirecTV Entertainment group, one of three new operating groups created by DirecTV president and CEO Chase Carey.