Actor-comedian John Leguizamo will join the team of TV doctors saving lives on NBC's hit hospital drama "ER" when the veteran show returns this fall for its 12th season, the network said on Tuesday.

Carl C. Icahn is now talking an even bigger game, but it may just be talk. A consortium of hedge funds led by Mr. Icahn, the activist investor, is discussing whether to ratchet up its pressure on Time Warner by raising its stake in the company to as much as 10 percent, according to people briefed on the group's talks.

I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall I'll never see a tree at all. Ogden Nash's improvement on Joyce Kilmer's bit of doggerel encapsulated sentiment in the late 1950s and early 1960s about the billboards that lined the highways and byways to the exclusion of the surrounding scenery.

A Puerto Rican agency is expanding to the mainland by opening a division based in New York that will specialize in producing campaigns for mainstream marketers seeking to reach Hispanic consumers. The expansion by the agency, Lopito, Ileana & Howie, is to be announced today by the principals in San Juan and New York. The formation of the division - named Azafrán, after the Spanish word for saffron - is among several fresh developments that underscore the intensifying ardor among agencies and advertisers in the booming Latino market.

Stephen Quinn, Frito-Lay's chief marketing officer is leaving the PepsiCo unit to join Wal-Mart as senior vice president of marketing, according to executives close to the company.

Aegis, the advertising placement company, is understood to have held talks with its French rival Havas about combining the groups' media buying operations in a venture designed to bolster their position against giants such as WPP and Publicis.

Oscar winner Charlize Theron is set to add some star power to Fox's "Arrested Development" when its third season debuts next month. Theron has signed on to guest-star in five episodes of the critically acclaimed black comedy, playing a British woman who becomes the love interest of "Development" star Jason Bateman. Theron will debut in the second "Development" episode of the season, after its September 19 premiere.

A magazine is declaring, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that if meetings be the food of love, play on. The magazine is Cooking Light, part of the Southern Progress Corporation, and the meetings are informal get-togethers of its readers, known as Cooking Light Supper Clubs. The gatherings, where readers cook meals using recipes from the magazine, then dine together, began in 1999 when Amy Fong, a reader in Alameda, Calif., organized the initial meetings on her own, without the magazine taking part.

Jim Garrity, Chief Marketing Officer, Wachovia, and his colleague, Bob DeAngelis, Senior Vice President, Managing Director, Customer Analytics, Research and Targeting, Wachovia, share their thoughts with me on marketing accountability and provide advice for marketers who are facing similar challenges below.

Ad spending in the media tracked by Nielsen Monitor-Plus shot up 5.7 percent during the first half of 2005, a faster rate of growth than some forecasters had been predicting. And the fastest rising medium was not the Internet, but Spanish-language TV, followed by cable TV. While Internet ad spending turned in a healthy 12.6 percent growth over the first half of 2004, that rate is much lower than what has been tracked by trade groups like the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and a number online ad forecasters.