There you are, online, tirelessly researching a lead. It's late, and you're encountering one dead end after another. Unwilling to give up, you return to Google, try a few new terms and peruse the results. Ah-ha - an interesting blog entry worth checking out. You haven't seen this site before, so maybe you're onto something. As you begin clicking through the entries, you wonder if this time you'll find the answers that will unravel the mystery: What is the Dharma Initiative, and where did that island go?

It doesn't take a presidential candidate to point out that these are hard times. The war, the energy crisis, America's faltering image abroad, global warming - these are problems that make it difficult for all of us to sleep at night.

I have never seen an ad for Google or Craigslist. Each of these companies makes millions of dollars, yet they do not advertise. Perhaps they do advertise, but I have never seen it. Meanwhile, American car companies are spending billions of dollars on advertising and losing millions. The difference - the reason - is social utility.

A few weeks ago, a friend had a question about her law firm. She wanted to know how the firm could identify its brand. During a conversation with her, we learned that this search for the brand began rather innocently. You see, she and a group of other associates formed a committee to recommend a new Web site design to the firm's senior partners. They met with Web designers and agencies, but as these meetings progressed, it occurred to them that they had no sense of the direction in which the site should go. Yes, the committee agreed that it …

Weezer just launched a brilliant video to promote its latest single, "Pork and Beans," which, even if you don't happen to like Weezer, is interesting for two reasons: First, and most boring, because it's obviously now standard practice to launch music videos online in advance of the single or the album. In this case, the video came out a full month before the release of the single. (It still amazes me how quickly that has become de rigueur in the music industry while brands in other much less interesting categories are still trying to put up walls between themselves and …

For better or for worse, Tony Schwartz had a hand in creating modern political campaigning, but not as directly as he has generally been credited with - or accused of. When he went to that big media consultancy in the sky this summer, there could not have been an obit that did not mention the infamous "daisy ad" created by Schwartz and the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach for Lyndon Johnson's presidential campaign in 1964.

I'd like to dedicate this issue of Media to Clay Felker, the legendary magazine editor who died last month at the age of 82. Without Clay Felker, there might not be a Media magazine. Without Clay Felker, I can tell you, you most likely wouldn't be reading a column written by Joe Mandese.

Change is inevitable. Just because things appear to be falling apart doesn't always mean they are. A series of potentially devastating downturns in the music industry due to the proliferation of illegal downloading and pirating has knocked it off its stride. The major record companies and independent artists will continue to suffer losses until an effective business model replaces the increasingly obsolete one where artists and labels survive largely off of record sales.

Thanks to CBS, even your mother knows Kimbo Slice. No? Then she somehow missed the network's promotional juggernaut launching the street fighter into iconic status as the face card of mixed martial arts, the blood sport that's caught fire in America. Guess she didn't download Slice's gruesome fistfights, still circulating on YouTube, or pick up an ESPN The Magazine with Slice's mug on the cover. Let's hope she doesn't know him from his former sponsor, RealityKings, the pornographers that run such warm and fuzzy sites as inthevip.com and MILF Hunter.

The buzz term is "moment of exclusivity." "With digital signage, we can make every sign in the building read Coke or Pepsi or whoever it might be," says Mark Foster, general manager of the Diamond Vision Systems Group for Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, one of a small number of companies doing brisk business right now by festooning big sports venues with giant light-emitting diode (LED) display systems. Mitsubishi's handiwork will soon be featured in the new Yankee Stadium, where the company will build a high-definition LED scoreboard measuring 101 feet wide and 59 feet tall.