If you're rooting for the continued revival of Chrysler Group, CEO Sergio Marchionne suggests you "just close your eyes, plug your nose and move on from here," because the first quarter was a stinker.

When Barbie whips out her iPad and gazes into her Barbie Digital Makeover Mirror, she apparently likes what she sees -- which is not only a much-needed brushing up of her own image but also a brighter future for her sister and brother Mattel brands from Hot Wheels to American Girl to Thomas the Tank Engine to Fisher Price to Matchbox cars, as Tiffany Hsu informs us in the "Los Angeles Times" this morning.

The American medical establishment, in general, and pharmaceutical companies, in particular, find themselves increasingly besieged for high prices (and often less than optimal results). But a new attack on the high cost of drugs by more than 100 oncologists in "Blood," the journal of the American Society of Hematology, is "unprecedented," according to Dr. John LaPook's report on the "CBS Evening News" last night.

Amazon's quest for brand ubiquity will next take it into the rooms where consumers' ginormous screens reside, if reports initiated by Bloomberg's Brad Stone yesterday prove correct. The set-top box would connect to TVs, just like similar devices from the likes of Apple, Roku and gaming consoles such as Microsoft's Xbox, and will feature the streaming content that Amazon, like Netflix, Hulu, Google and others are racing to both buy and initiate, inside sources tell him.

The world of political spin is unlike marketing as we know it in that it seems to rely exclusively on blood-roiling bluster and bravado to retain current customers rather than in enticing trial from consumers loyal to another brand with well-reasoned features-and-benefits arguments.

The rehabilitation of Netflix' image following its pricing debacle of 2011 continued in the first quarter of 2013 with more than two million new subscribers proving that original thinking can eventually trump unpopular marketing decisions. "Netflix Has Good Hand With 'House Of Cards,' Shares Soar 24 Percent," as the Reuters' hed puts it.

Today is Earth Day, an event that began as a "teach-in" in 1970 and now is purportedly celebrated by upwards of one billion people in 192 countries around the globe and is the occasion for all sorts of enterprising media packages telling us everything from how sports stadiums like Philly's Franklin Field are learning to "hold the carbon-emitting negativity" to Canon Marketing in Taiwan inviting employees and others to a tree-planting event to what cheap compost bins to buy for our own patches of suburbia.

Steve Jobs has apparently been dead long enough that he's fair game not only for a satirical (and controversial) 78-minute biopic on "Funny or Die" but also for nervous Nellie investors who are dating his demise as the beginning of the end of Apple itself.

If you've ever had a bad day at the office, you probably will empathize with Tesco CEO Philip Clarke who, when asked by a radio interviewer yesterday about the company's disastrous 199-outlet foray into the American market, replied "I'd rather not talk about it."

A young woman told me the other day that she was meeting up with some friends who were "making a viral video." I thought I detected some irony in her voice so I didn't make a wisecrack along the lines of "Oh yeah, what's next? A Boffo Box Office Indie?" How is it then, that Kmart, of all people, has crafted the viral video du jour?