Advertising Age

A week of visits to marketers and ad agencies (and just walking around Tokyo) was a mind-bending adventure of learning about innovations that somehow haven't traveled outside Japan's borders.

Who knew an ad to celebrate not just a newspaper, but possibly the entire journalism industry, could be so good?

Viewers tuned to ABC, NBC or CBS on March 4 were no doubt stunned to see a rare animal on U.S. TV -- an epic three-and-one-half-minute commercial for Cartier that took two years and $5.3 million to produce.

SB Nation's network of 300 sports blogs and main site reached about 11 million unique visitors in January. With that audience behind it, SB Nation is making a strong push into original video programming.

You tune into a cable network and peruse the roster: a reality show about a child beauty queen, a pop-culture review and a canine-makeover series. No, this isn't TLC or Oxygen, but Logo, Viacom's LGBT-focused cable channel.

MOM Brands said it secured the "Generation" slogan after Pepsi allowed its trademark to lapse. A PepsiCo spokesman said the last time the company used the trademark was in 1991.

Digital skills are no longer a plus but expected. Mobile and social media are the two areas most in demand. Midlevel analytics jobs are a sweet spot, and media agencies need strategists focused on loyalty and content marketing.

As Univision programming gets more and more regular viewers, the network is taking a direct stab at NBC, saying marketers' ad dollars would be better spent on its shows.

Netflix has been careful to describe itself as a complement to cable distributors, but as it quietly tests network-branded pages in what appears to be an effort to give content partners more visibility, it risks positioning itself as a substitute for cable packages.

Stitching together a confederation of web giants that include Google, Yahoo, AOL, Hulu, Microsoft and digital-agency Digitas took some diplomacy, but they're all in it for the same thing -- TV ad dollars.

The 19-year-old chain is still growing and shows no signs of slowing down, yet it has one of the leanest traditional-marketing budgets around.

Journalism has long favored the quick. Today, however, the proliferation of digital technologies has spurred a different need for speed. Specifically, the Fourth Estate is feeling increased pressure to become immediately ubiquitous on every mobile...

Have a peek at an excerpt from Jane Maas' new book, "Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the 60s and Beyond."

The global economy makes it even more important to have visual hammers, which often require no translation, says Laura Ries, in challenging her father Al's famed theory on positioning.

For all marketing's obsession with return on investment, a new study says it's not actually used to set budgets. A survey of 243 CMOs found that 57% don't establish their budgets according to ROI measures.

Meet America's latest test market: the viewers of upstate New York's WNCE/Look TV.

Pace of popularity surge -- 70 million views in five days -- leaves little time for nonprofit Invisible Children to reflect, or react, when it found itself in the crosshairs of criticism.

Google's 'Project: Re-Brief,' created by Johannes Leonardo and Grow Interactive, revisits old-school favorite ads from Coca-Cola, Volvo, Alka-Seltzer and Avis, and translates their message into various digital formats -- showing off Google technology in the process.

In a campaign for CDW, Charles Barkley joins the IT department of a fictional company looking for a basketball ringer.

U.S. Marine Corps tweaks its messaging to better appeal to millennials and minorities.