My friend Nigel Hollis, chief global aalyst at WPP's Millward Brown, an advertising research firm, invited friends to submit brand questions, and receive personal replies and insights in return. This was in anticipation of his forthcoming book, "The Global Brand," based on Millward Brown's annual BrandZ study of 10,000 brands in 31 countries. Always up for challenging Nigel's classical research assumptions, I submitted a question many advertising researchers struggle to answer: how corporate actions holistically shape brands versus marketing communications. His response was very good, so I thought I'd share his insights here.

The U.S. newspaper industry is in tough times, and it's getting worse. As many of you know, I worked in the newspaper industry a number of years ago and like to write about it from time to time. Given the financial predicaments that many U.S. newspaper companies find themselves in these days, particularly those that publish metropolitan, or "big city," papers. I thought that I would use today's column to offer some of my suggestions for "reconstructing" the American metropolitan newspaper.

Media planning is a combination of art and science -- and whether you know it or not, it has been changing over the last few years. There are many traditional ways to create a media plan, but the basics are always the same: you identify the target audience and then hypothesize the right types of media vehicles and placements that will reach them with a targeted message. What has changed is the difference between tactical media planning and strategic media planning. Many agencies practice tactical media planning rather than strategic media planning, and there is a subtle difference. Tactical …