"I really don't know what that means," says the potential cell phone customer to the Verizon salesperson expounding confusingly about the virtues of 4G. It's all part of the "Saturday Night Live" fake ad "poking fun at the alphabet soup and numerical nightmare that you’ll find yourself embroiled within if you decide to buy a connected device," writes Charlie White. Our favorite part of the ad was this exchange: "What if I drop it in the toilet?" "It breaks immediately." Check it out here.

The Grammys pulled in record (pun intended) ratings last night, tracking 39 million viewers and a 14.1 rating in adults 18-49 -- numbers second only to 1984's broadcast. (And what happened that year? Michael Jackson won big for his landmark "Thriller" album. We Googled around to see if that ceremony also marked his first big televised moonwalk, but couldn't find any conclusive videos.) Such numbers will probably bump up the ad rates for next year's broadcast; average for this year was close to $800,000 per 30-second spot, according to one report.

Major media news companies are faltering in their move into digital advertising,  according to a study by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalisms. One problem: Such companies "have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online," notes an analysis of the report. For another: "With only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue."

Next month high-end publisher Cottages & Gardens will debut New York Cottages & Gardens, to be published five times yearly and targeted to "upper-income areas of the city, Westchester Country, Long Island and Hudson Valley," writes Steve Smith. With a focus on design, real estate and gardening, the new book will be helmed by an editor already in charge at a sister publication, Kendell Cronstrom of Hamptons Cottages & Gardens.

Universal Pictures just announced its movie "Bridesmaids" has tracked $40 million through cable and internet VOD platforms -- big numbers that also represent one of the first time a studio has released VOD figures to the press. Daniel Frankel discusses the reasons for studios' lack of transparency -- including "the byzantine nature of the old-Hollywood accounting culture, its remnants still intact despite the corporate takeover of the studios by media corporations—the less the world knows about your revenue streams, the less you have to share them."

Executives from the likes of News Corp. and the National Association of Broadcasters met with the Federal Communications Commission to protest proposed rules that would require publicizing details of TV networks' political ad deals.  Having to disclose such details would mean that “[C]ompetitors in the market and commercial advertisers may anonymously glean highly sensitive pricing data, which, by law, will represent the lowest rates charged by the station to its most favored commercial advertisers,” the execs argued in a letter.

Wall Street Journal reporters covering Fashion Week are posting on two new-to-the-WSJ social networks: Pineterest and Instagram. "Pinterest offers the chance to reach massive, sharing-oriented new audiences — but also requires a different, more visual kind of editorial thinking," writes Andrew Phelps. He analyzes WSJ's social network strategy and notes that other news outlets, including Time and Newsweek, are also joining the Pinterest bandwagon.

With Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue hitting newsstands today, Business Insider’s Sports Page reports that the special issue has “turned into its own business and tech empire that, on its own, rivals the magazine that gave birth to it.”  In fact, the swimsuit issue is SI’s biggest single “cash cow” -- and, as reporters Dina Spector and Dashiell Bennett  note at the start, it’s also “a convenient excuse for sports sites (like this one) to publish photos of girls in bikinis.” And so they do.

Sure, the Super Bowl amassed record ratings -- but four million people snuck away from the festivities to catch "Downton Abbey" on PBS, making "Abbey" the second-most-watched show of the night. Its numbers are only expected to go up as DVR ratings come in from those who opted to watch the Super Bowl live.  Reporter Michael O’Connell notes that "Downton Abbey" “is probably closer to a critical mass than anything that's ever come out of PBS' Masterpiece Classics franchise.”  And, while O’Connell doesn’t mention it, here’s more evidence of the show’s hit status, also from Super Bowl weekend: a "Saturday …

The war between the states and local newspapers over who will publish legal notices is heating up again, as cash-strapped municipalities look hungrily at the traditional, revenue-producing franchise of papers everywhere. "Proposals to loosen legal notice requirements pop up every year in various states" but have until now been defeated by "state press associations and individual newspapers [that] have mobilized successful lobbying campaigns, writes Rick Edmonds. He discusses what's been happening lately on this front.