While fashion bloggers have been wielding more power with each runway season, Hanes' Just My Size is betting the plus-sized bloggers have even more to say, wooing them with a fashion event this week in New York. And it's just part of an effort, the Winston-Salem, N.C.-based company says, to use social media to build its connection to one of America's largest—if most-spurned--consumer groups. While marketers, retailers and even mainstream fashion media have certainly stepped up efforts to connect with heavier women, "she is getting tired of being ignored," Marie Teza, director and general manager of JMS, tells Marketing …

The number of people banking via mobile phone has more than doubled to 13 million in the last two years, according to new findings from Nielsen. That's about 5% of all U.S. mobile users. According to a June 2010 survey, those using their mobile phone for Web-based banking tend to be younger, male and more ethnically diverse than their online banking counterparts.

• 36% are between the ages of 25-34, while only 18% represent that same age group online
• Males represent 53% of this population versus 43% online
• 30% are Hispanic while this same user group represents only 11% of …

Stolichnaya Vodka is generating plenty of buzz -- no doubt on social media, as well as in the press -- by having snagged Twitter co-founder Biz Stone as the latest "star" of its Stoli Originals ad campaign.  The just-launched Stone versions show his somewhat cooler "Twitter Pioneer" persona  and his "Nerd of the Year" side debating the Twitter phenomenon while drinking Stoli in an upscale bar. Nerd Stone:  "Has it ever occurred to you that maybe Twitter is just a constant stream of meaningless babble?" Pioneer Stone: "You're not seeing the big picture. Astronauts are tweeting from space...and the …

Social media marketing firm Buddy Media has closed $23 million in a third-round funding led by Institutional Venture Partners and including existing investors Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners and Bay Partners. The new funding brings the company's total raised to date to more than $33 million. The capital will go towards tripling Buddy Media's rapidly rising headcount from 100 to 300 over the next 18 months, as well as ongoing marketing and growth initiatives. The company's chairman CEO, Mike Lazerow, announced the new financing Monday during a gathering at Buddy Media's new 25,000-square-foot office headquarters in Manhattan. The company …

Apple easily beat analyst expectations for its fiscal fourth quarter on surging sales of the iPhone 4 and iPad. For the quarter, Apple  reported net income of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 per share, compared to net income of $2.53 billion, or $2.77 per share, for the year-earlier period. Revenue jumped 67% to $20.3 billion. Analysts forecast earnings of $4.10 per share on revenue of $18.9 billion. Apple sold 14.1 million iPhones in the quarter, up 91% from a year ago, and 4.19 million iPads. iPod sales continued to lag, falling 11% to 9.05 million from a year ago, …

While Target is continuing its roll-out of the $1 billion P-fresh format—announcing make-overs of 114 stores in Chicago, Dallas and Washington D.C.—industry execs continue to mull over just how big the small-format trend may be. Last week, Walmart told investors that it, too, would intensify the opening of smaller stores. Target, which announced its P-fresh format early in the year, has been reconfiguring its smaller stores to include an open-market grocery layout, stocked with a selection of fresh produce, fresh meat and baked goods. It offers 90% of the categories found in a SuperTarget, albeit with much less selection. …

National TV advertisers looking for make-goods on Fox? There are three million-less TV homes in Fox's network, now from the fallout over the Cablevision Systems -- Fox network retransmission dispute in the New York area. All that means some TV marketers will be looking to get whole from their respective media buys. Already affected: Major League Baseball, which witnessed a blackout of MLB's League Championship Series games on Saturday. More baseball playoff games are being threatened. All this came after a Friday midnight deadline where Fox pulled its local-area Fox stations -- as well as some of its …

At the ANA conference, Cindy Gallop, former head of BBH's New York office (who now apparently lives in an all-black apartment that used the be the men's locker room at the Chelsea, NY YMCA and whose web site is festooned with photos of her at a party that looks an awful like a reunion of Studio 54 vets) said the whole idea of doing good is inherently boring, which is why businesses struggle to take action and that the future of advertising is not about the big idea, but production. And, sounding an awful lot like a character from an …

Fidelity's EVP and CMO Jim Speros said the marketers' version of "location, location, location": What you say, where you say it and how is key to building a brand in a down economy. "The delivery channel itself could enhance the message if you do it correctly." For example, the company ran cartoons in the New Yorker, and bought ads on golf cart GPS units. He said the company uses social media as a way to carry on high level discussions -- thought leadership -- and thereby engage people who are already talking about finance.

Keith Pardy, CMO of Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry had good news about the brand. Speaking at ANA's yearly confab, he said the BlackBerry made it to the list of top five phones globally for the first time in the first quarter this year. He said BlackBerry is the leading smartphone in North America, and in Latin America it is the third fastest growiing brand. Pardy, who argued, among other things, that the key is finding a central truth inside one's company and then expressing it outside, chatted with Starcom/Mediavest CEO Laura Desmond. She contends that human …