Starbucks raises outlook after strong second quarter.

Boeing gets clearance for re-launching Dreamliner in Japan and United's planes in May.

Altria Group plans to enter e-cigarette market.

3M cuts outlook as demand sputters.

Amazon outstrips growing profits with growing spending.

Best Buy tries to reduce "pain points" for customers, staff.

Cap'n Crunch launches new YouTube channel for adults.

Exxon Mobil oil output falls again.Continue reading...

Chrysler recalls more than 214,000 vehicles.

JCPenney acting CMO Sergio Zyman canvasses adland for marketing help as Macy's/Martha Stewart trial rolls on.

GM returns to Facebook advertising with mobile test for Chevy Sonic as it provokes unionists in Korea with talk about pullout, and Facebook widens data targeting for advertisers.

Aereo finds broadcasters circling the wagons against its streaming model.

Apple and Yahoo discuss deeper iPhone partnership, WSJ says.

Beech-Nut teams with Goya to launch Hispanic baby food line.

Behr launches social media program to market paint.

Cablevision Systems gives more responsibilities to wife of CEO.

Cannes Lions Festival adds jury on Branded Content and Entertainment.

Chili's begins marketing pizza nationwide.

Facebook has yet to monetize billion-dollar Instagram acquisition.

Fiat becomes more reliant on US and Asia for growth.

Fisker Automotive prepares to file under Chapter 11 soon.

Frontier Airlines may be on the block, WSJ says.Continue reading...

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg unveils $12 million ad campaign (above) for Mayors Against Illegal Guns that lobbies for background checks to reduce gun violence, while NYC's municipal data geek squad makes headlines.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz defends same-sex marriage support to shareholders as brand expands loyalty rewards to other retailers.

PepsiCo shares jump on Mondelez merger speculation sparked by Telegraph story which Pepsi "downplays."

Apple acquires indoor GPS startup WiFiSLAM for mapping, patents iPhone drop protection technology and faces EU scrutiny following iPhone and iPad distribution complaints — and may report first quarterly dip since 2003.

FTC "pay for delay" generic drug case, set to go before US Supreme Court on Monday, will be closely watched by pharmaceutical industry and economists.

Below: BlackBerry, Blockbuster, Dell, Diageo and other brands in the news —Continue reading...

"Nice Fake Hack @MTV." That tweet was the critical response of adult film brand Brazzers to MTV's (truly dumb) BET-MTV fake hack stunt. And Brazzers should know. It was that same day that the porno outlet revealed that one of its star actors was not, in fact, as dead as everyone had thought.

As if Brazzers needed any help with its creative and aggressive marketing. The online brand is quickly becoming the most known—and most mainstream—brand name for naked, including product placement in some of music's most popular music videos.

On Feb. 18, a screenshot of a Brazzers tweet announcing "Today we say goodbye to our dear friend Johnny Sins. died in a car crash accident. always in our heart" spilled onto the internet. Even though the tweet looked a little sketchy, sites, especially Spanish language ones like the Facebook page Fap Fap Fap Fap posted it. From there and a few other places, is was forwarded and liked hundreds and hundreds of times. Continue reading...

Since MTV aired “Video Killed the Radio Star” back in August of 1981, the company has gotten into plenty of things that haven’t involved music at all, from asking its viewers to “Rock the Vote” to exposing the world to the somehow fascinating mundane dramas of young adults on the Jersey shore. 

Now, Viacom’s MTV Networks International is getting into another business: selling branded tablets in India. Or, as the Telecom Tiger puts it, fablets (presumably, a more fab version of phablets). MTV has announced a partnership with Swipe Telecom to produce a co-branded fablet, MTV Volt.

The 6-inch smartphone features a television screen so people can get their MTV wherever they are. The youth-centric device will also serve as, “a fully functional high-definition Android tablet with Wi-Fi, dual cameras, FM player and GPS functionality,” that weighs half a pound and retails for around 12,999 Rupees or $240, Telecom Tiger reports. And, of course, built-in apps allow users to get right onto Facebook and LinkedIn.Continue reading...

When VH1 got started way back in 1985, the cable TV network followed right in the footsteps of its sibling MTV, although focused its efforts at an older demo. While MTV (short for Music Television) scored big with tunes for adolescents and young adults (Men at Work, anyone?), VH1 (an acronym for Video Hits One) was going for the slightly older crowd, playing music videos featuring the likes of Elton John, Donna Summer, and Rod Stewart.

The thirst for an endless stream of music videos on both Viacom-owned channels came to a halt only a few years into their collective existence and shows with varying levels of quality were cranked out. VH1 scored hits with the annotated Pop-Up Video series, the gossipy tell-all bio series Behind the Music, and the artist-centric VH1 Storytellers. The music in both brands has consistently been drowned out since then with a slew of other programming, inspiring the perennial plea by boomers to bring back the music to MTV and VH1 (season three of IFC's Portlandia kicked off with a plotline to take back MTV from tween with its original VJs and news anchor, Kurt Loder.)

VH1, for one, has decided to indicate that shift with a change in its logo (or as the company likes to call it, "tagmark"). 

As announced at the TCA TV Critics Association press tour, VH1 is kicking off the new year by adding a plus sign to the end of its logo, to reflect the changes in the digital world — meshing together the network’s music, pop culture and nostalgia content together — in tandem with adopting a black-and-white look and feel to its visual identity and on-air promos. It's promoting the new look with, naturally, a #plussed hashtag on Twitter.Continue reading...

More and more TV viewers are turning to the web for their audio-visual pleasures, streaming shows and movies from such places as Hulu, Netflix, and AppleTV, among a growing list of others. 

YouTube, of course, is the grandpa of the online video-entertainment biz and is refusing to take a backseat to all the Johnny-come-latelys that are making their moves now. In the past year, YouTube owner Google has invested more than $100 million in 100 original channels to invite brands and professional producers create original high-quality content for the site. Even though viewership numbers weren’t particularly high, the site is shelling out some big bucks again, but this time to only 30 or 40 of those content creators, according to AllThingsD.com.

The metric of most interest to YouTube (and parent Google) execs is “the total ‘watch time’ a channel has generated” as well as cost, AllThingsD reports. The site’s top 25 channels averaged more than a million views a week, Ad Age reports, and “the top 33 have more than 100,000 subscribers, a key indicator of repeat viewing.”Continue reading...

Facebook is encouraging its U.S. users to share that they've voted for an interactive map, while Twitter has set up its election page to track the #Election2012 winds of change. But it's Facebook's more visual sub-brand, theonce niche mobile photo-sharing app Instagram, that's the darling of the digital world for the 2012 U.S. presidential election cycle.

Since being snapped up by Facebook for $1 billion in April, and following its launch of an Android version of its app, the brand has grown its user base from 15 million to 80 million since January 1st, with an astonishing 4 billion photos posted this year to date. Further proof, if any is needed, that photo-sharing is hot: Coca-Cola is getting in on the game with its Happy Places app, while Twitter and Facebook are racing to improve their photo filters.

The 2012 U.S. presidential election day represents Instagram’s coming out party. Its usual feed today is replaced by a stream of voter’s ballots and related political imagery, which could exceed half a million uploads by election day's end. While encouraging its users to share their election day photos with the tag #ivoted, they are being reminded to not snap a pic of their election ballot, which could render it void in certain states. In another first, the New York Times is also featuring voters' Instagram photos on their homepage election coverage.Continue reading...