Tributes to Stephen Covey, whose self-help principles crisscrossed the threshold from workplace to home in ways that programs like Six Sigma or Deming's 14 Principles never could, have been pouring in since his death Monday resulting from a biking accident several months ago. At 79, Covey took a tumble on a downhill run in April and never recovered from head injuries he sustained.

"Adweek"'s headline reads "Digital Industry Cheers ..." and the first observer quoted in the "New York Times"' front-page coverage of Google's Marissa Mayer ascendancy to the CEOship of Yahoo is WPP Group's CEO Martin Sorrell. He doesn't say very much of interest, but it's an interesting choice of commentators to feature.

A looming question on the minds of competitive consumer packaged good marketers -- as well as investors -- this week is "Wherefore art thou, Procter & Gamble?" in light of the estimated $1 to $2 billion stake that "activist" investor William A. Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management has taken in the company.

It's time we checked in on Comic-Con, the get-together for comic-book dweebs founded in San Diego in 1970 that has become appointment exhibitionism for the superpowers of entertainment marketing and the star power they bring to us mere earthlings.

Marvin S. Traub, who Women's Wear Daily calls "one of the 20th century's most visionary retailers, acclaimed for his merchandising and marketing showmanship," died at home in Manhattan yesterday. He was 87 and is survived byhis wife, Lee, and three children, Andrew, James and Peggy.

The operative modifier in stories following up on the Wall Street Journal's beat yesterday that Alex Bogusky is "returning to the advertising industry after a two-year absence" is the phrase "kinda, sorta." As the WSJ's Suzanne Vranica reports, the former creative director and partner at Crispin Porter + Bogusky will only be spending half his toiling day doing whatever it is that "creative gurus" do at Made Movement LLC, the five-month-old agency that only handles brands made in the US of A.

PepsiCo's joint venture foray into the exploding yogurt category with German dairy company Theo Mller has been pretty much fermenting in plain site until Stephanie Strom asked yesterday in the "New York Times" if the legendary cola wars were about to be replaced by the yogurt wars as Pepsi "takes on the likes of Dannon and General Mills [Yoplait], not to mention Fage and Chobani."

Who do you call when a Super Hero teeters on the brink of losing his or her ability to draw mass amounts of audience on flimsy plot lines, blinding star power and lots of unlikely special effects? The League of Marketers, of course - that amorphous group of Hollywood talent adept in the art of "rebooting" the franchise with a dollop of blarney and a massive infusion of dollars. Witness Peter Parker and his altered ego, Spider Man. Spidey Spins A Successful Reboot, Most Say

Walgreen will pay $438 million for a 144 -store regional drug store chain in the mid-South that operates under the USA Drug, Super D and May's banner. The stores, concentrated in Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee, are part of an acquisition "spree," as several reports put it, aimed to rejuvenate sales figures at the nation's largest drug store chain. The company also announced yesterday that same-store sales from June 2011 to 2012 were down a higher-than-analysts-expected 10.7%, with pharmacy revenue slipping 15%.

It just happens to be one of life's delightful serendipities, Dr. Drew Pinsky would have us believe. Yes, he got money from Glaxo Wellcome back in the day that he was saying that Wellbutrin "may enhance or at least not suppress sexual arousal" as much as other antidepressants but the observation was based on what he heard with his own two ears and had nothing to do with the 275Gs deposited in his bank account on behalf of what is now GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).