I watched "Adaptation" last week. It's the Charlie Kaufman movie about Charlie Kaufman trying to make a movie about a book, "The Orchid Thief," by Susan Orlean. In the movie, Kaufman, played by Nicolas Cage, ends up taking Robert McKee's (played here by Brian Cox) famous screenwriting class. I took that class, too, and I'm thinking of doing something Kaufman-esque about the auto industry, the Korean auto industry.

Auto brands are hard to revive and harder to reposition in a world of upstarts. Take Tesla, an outlier: its founder is part of the Millennial success leit motif (young, digital billionaire, iconoclastic); the engineers for its sibling brand are, literally, rocket scientists; it's an upstart, which is always sexy; and it's a niche brand with a tiny lineup and little scale and volume. Downside for them: they probably lose money with each sale.

When you say "college sports" everyone in the room will probably imagine their team, favorite sport, or mascot. Houses nationwide are painted in their owners' team colors. Many have rooms that are de facto shrines to the household alma mater. Nissan is hoping to tap into that passion with its historic deal that infuses its brand, nationally and locally, into the NCAA sports experience at some 100 colleges. Jeremy Tucker, Nissan's U.S. CMO, says the company's huge new program is about connecting that national brand down to the local market, and tying both to a major passion point for students, …

Auto dealers are a lot smarter about marketing now than they were a few years back. Many have social media staffers now, not just digital sales people who fished for leads and handled CRM email. But at the rate the digital universe is expanding, and consumers are darting to new channels, they might want to hire teenagers. One company that navigates this space is Dealertrack Technologies. That company has also gotten a whole lot bigger since being acquired by Atlanta-based media giant Cox for $4 billion.

October was amazing for the car business. Take Ford. The company says it is enjoying its best retail numbers in 11 years: monthly sales were up 13%, with the F-150 pickup, the key vehicle, up by about that percentage. And sales of cars are up 17%. Same drill for SUVs and crossovers. So it is fair to wonder why Ford is launching a huge, year-end sales campaign, its biggest in years. What is Ford up to? It looks a lot like a pre-emptive strike? The sinking of the Lusitania? The "Friends and Neighbors" program, according to "Automotive News," which cadged …