• CDC Previews Second Round Of Anti-Smoking Ads
    In a week when the Food and Drug Administration caved in to the tobacco industry's legal challenge to its gruesome anti-smoking warnings on cigarette packs, the Centers for Disease Control yesterday unveiled a new series of heart-wrenching advertisements that show former smokers struggling with the effects of their -- and their loved one's -- addictions.
  • Walmart Banking On E-Commerce Boom
    Walmart e-Commerce is thinking about lifting an idea from the digital ethosphere -- Reuters' Alistair Barr and Jessica Wohl compare it to "crowd-sourcing" or the "sharing economy" in an exclusive this morning -- that would use its in-store customers to deliver packages to its online buyers.
  • Nike In The Rough Over Tiger Ad
    When Vince Lombardi told us winning was "the only thing," it was a straightforward assertion about a different sort of boy's game that men play than the one that led to Tiger Woods' fall from media grace and No. 1 ranking as his golf game soured.
  • T-Mobile To Roll Out New Pricing In NYC Event
    Are you ready for T-Mobile's "Uncarrier Event" today? You should be because all of the details of the No. 4-and-slipping mobile carrier's plans to offer contract-less services -- while ending the practice of subsidizing what consumers shell out for their increasingly sophisticated and costly phones -- have been posted on its website and parsed by online experts for quite some hours now.
  • Joe Weider, 93, Put Marketing Into Muscle
    Joe Weider, the archetypal (fill in the blank)-pound teen weakling who bulked up and created a far-flung media, business and social network -- including the phenomenon that became Arnold Schwarzenegger -- died Saturday of heart failure in the San Fernando Valley, Calif. He was 93, and among the pantheon of influential bodybuilders -- cf. Charles Atlas and Jack LaLanne -- whose branding instructs matched their muscle mass.
  • McDonald's Takes The Wraps Off Its 'Subway Buster'
    In what several observers see as an attempt to derail competitors' trains running on the "healthier-for-you" track, McDonald's yesterday announced that it is adding Premium McWraps to its menu. The three entree-sized offerings -- Chicken & Bacon, Sweet Chili Chicken and Chicken & Ranch -- are wrapped with a flour tortilla and packed with such veggies such as spring greens, romaine lettuce and tomatoes. Two will have cucumbers and, yes, there is cheese.
  • HP Board Still Sitting After Harsh Campaign
    Despite severe blows to Hewlett-Packard's image as a well-run company and the resulting steep fall in its stock price -- although there has been a recent upswing -- shareholders yesterday resisted a campaign by dissidents to throw out several members of the board who were up for re-election at the annual meeting. The campaign has been marked by unusually strident public statements and website postings by usually buttoned-down rabble-rousers, marked by acrimony usually contained to schoolyards.
  • FTC Finds Fake Fur Is Real
    It a seems like a panel in a Bizarro Superman comic book plot, where everything is the opposite of what it should be. In what the "New York Times"' Julie Creswell calls a "forehead-slapping development," the Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday a preliminary settlement with Neiman Marcus and two other retailers over marketing some clothing items that falsely claimed that they contained fake fur.
  • American Honda Divvies Up Billion-Dollar Ad Account
    An American Honda Motor Co. agency review that "Ad Age" calls "the most closely watched ... of the past year" ended with mixed emotions at the incumbent of 27 years, RPA. Although it retained the Honda portion of the account, it lost the creative for the Acura luxury business to Interpublic's Mullen and the media for both brands to Publicis Groupe's Starcom MediaVest. Muse Communications (African-American and Asian-American consumers) and Orci (Hispanic consumers) retain the multicultural assignments.
  • Penney Gets A Breath Of Joe Fresh Air
    JC Penney tried another Fresh start Friday -- literally -- with the formal opening of 681 Joe Fresh stores-within-the-store across the U.S. Owned by the Canadian giant Loblaw Cos., Joe Fresh offers trendy, low-priced clothes that are popular in Canada but were previously little known in the U.S.
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