Seven months after Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, exhorted his colleagues to re-engineer the network's evening newscast, the drafting process has reached an apparent milestone: the news division has begun to record and edit prototypes of how that broadcast could soon look.

In the last several days, accounts with spending estimated at more than $200 million have changed agencies, affecting brands in competitive categories like restaurants, automotive services and household products. And there will be more changes as reviews proceed for other accounts, with combined spending estimated at more than $1 billion. The accounts still in review involve brands like BMW, Bank of America, L. L. Bean, British Airways, Lowe's, LensCrafters, Liberty Mutual and Morgan Stanley.

Mark Shapiro, the head of programming at Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN, is leaving the network to become CEO of Red Zone, LLC, a private investment company that has launched an effort to gain control of Six Flags Inc.

More and more cable networks are dealing with split personalities these days -- by design. Court TV last month became the latest major outlet to implement bifurcated programming and marketing strategies that target distinctly different audiences in primetime and in other dayparts. It's a tactic that has worked well for Nickelodeon and its Nick at Nite primetime offspring and more recently for Cartoon Network and its late-night Adult Swim animation block, which now are sold to Madison Avenue as separate programming services.

Per capita consumer spending for media will breach the $1,000-per-year mark for the first time in the U.S. in 2009 as the communications industry marches along at a 6.7 percent annual growth rate, exceeding $1 trillion in 2008.

Speaking on June 6 at an analysts' conference, Interpublic Group of Cos. CEO Michael Roth hailed the ad company's relationship with Bank of America as an example of "a holding-company model alive and well and kicking out in the marketplace." But the truth was that the bank had asked at least one other advertising holding company about its interest in the business a full month before that.

Madison Avenue is increasingly interested in using everyday women in advertising instead of just waifish supermodels. The change comes after the Dove line of personal-care products sold by Unilever introduced what it called a "campaign for real beauty," which presents women in advertisements as they are rather than as some believe they ought to be. If the fad becomes a trend and shows legs, so to speak, it has the potential to fundamentally change decades of image-making on Madison Avenue.

Led by the Dove "beauties" campaign featuring real women rather than perfect models, these ads seem to be striking a chord with consumers.

Merrill Lynch reiterated a "neutral" rating on Time Warner, saying a complete spin-off of the cable division is unlikely despite urging by Carl Icahn.

Leverage is not what it used to be for media and entertainment companies swept up in the digital broadband revolution, as witnessed by the complex changes afoot in valuing television content supply and demand. With television's traditional food chain being shaken to its core by technological innovations, industry players on both sides of the content equation are groping for ways to use technology-driven changes to their advantage. But getting there means sifting through some fairly weighty questions that have no easy answers and rewriting the status quo.