The Big Game doesn't kick off until Sunday, but brand marketers' "reveals" of their Super Bowl campaigns are intensifying this week.

Whether they're "teasing" their actual Super Bowl spots such as Century 21, or letting everything hang out there like Hyundai (which today released all five of its Game Day commercials, and a barrage of video extras) and Honda and others, there's a torrent of Game Day spots like never before.

Will there be anything actually new to watch once the Big Game comes on? Remember when the idea was to save the reveal for during the game and be the talk of the office water cooler on Monday morning?

Here's a look at some of the latest revelations:Continue reading...

Acura makes the Sundance Festival a stage.

Airbus fixes cracked A380 wings as fault found.

Facebook marketer Buddy Media finds business is booming.

GE finds in study that shared content ranks higher with consumers than paid placement.

GM CEO offers resolute defense of Volt before Congress.

Illumina adopts poison pill against Roche.

J.C. Penney "reinvents" department-store retailing.

Netflix looks ahead as it returns to subscriber growth.Continue reading...

The annual indie-film extravaganza known as the Sundance Film Festival got underway Thursday night in Park City, Utah, and the New York Times noticed something there that had been missing at recent fests: many corporate sponsors.

Eight brands are officially sponsoring this year's festival, which launched as an offshoot of Robert Redford's Sundance Institute in 1978: Adobe, GE, Sprint, Yahoo!, Bertolli, Grey Goose, Time Warner, and Hilton. Last year, the festival had two — Honda and Trident — and neither of them are back.Continue reading...

The way automotive brands have come to dominate Super Bowl advertising, you'd think individual brand messages would tend to get washed out amid the cacaphony of automotive pitches. But the reverberant success of Super Bowl ads by Chrysler and Volkswagen last year has car makers believing they might be able to hit the jackpot, even when their industry rivals can't.

Such are the hopes of executives of Hyundai and Lexus heading into each brand's appearance during Super Bowl XLVI on Fox on February 5. But while Hyundai is hoping finally to move up to what it considers the top tier of Super Bowl success, in its fourth consecutive year of Big Game participation, Lexus will be a first-time participant that's just hoping to break through.

The brands are at entirely different spots. Hyundai is riding high after a 20-percent U.S. sales gain last year and having its 2012 Elantra named North American Car of the Year last week, while Lexus is badly in need of 2012 to become a comeback year for the brand, after a disastrous 2011.Continue reading...

The actual teams that will be involved in this year’s Super Bowl will be decided this weekend, but marketers have long known just who was going to be competing for consumer eyeballs when it came to the commercials for some time.

Even though the economy is still not so great and prices went up for Super Bowl ads (about $3.5 million for 30 seconds of selling time compared with $3 million last year), the Feb. 5th broadcast’s ad space is sold out, according to the Wall Street Journal. Most of those slots were snapped up by September, and the remaining were sold out by Thanksgiving, the paper reports.

For longtime Bowl advertisers Anheuser-Busch InBev, which bought 4½ minutes of time this year, the event is old hat.

For others, this marks the first time they are making the plunge and they are trying to find any way possible to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack, USA Today reports. However, being a first-timer leaves some feeling a bit nervous since a Super Bowl ad can either make or break a product.

"There is no middle ground on the Super Bowl," says David Lubars, creative chief at BBDO, USA Today reports. "You either kill or get killed."Continue reading...

With Super Bowl XLVI looming on February 5th, marketers are starting to trickle out news of their plans during the big game. The latest:

• The Mars-owned M&M's brand will introduce a new character during its Super Bowl spot (by BBDO New York) during the first quarter: Ms. Brown, according to the New York Times. She's the sixth candy character (following red, yellow, blue, green, and orange) and the second female in the cast, following Ms. Green, and will be portrayed as a behind-the-scenes character and the brand's "chief chocolate officer." Ms. Brown now has a Twitter account (@mmsbrown) and is being teased (above) on the M&M's Facebook page.

• H&M announced today that the Swedish fast-fashion retailer will run a 30-second TV spot (produced in-house) during the second quarter of the game, featuring the upcoming David Beckham Bodywear collection of men's underwear in the first Super Bowl spot for the brand and for Beckham.Continue reading...

Hyundai just keeps rolling along. The latest testament to the stunning rise of the Korean brand in the U.S. market is its industry-best showing in J.D. Power's much-watched customer-retention study, announced this week. Last night, Hyundai's growing relationship with its customers also was recognized in its first award in annual prizes sponsored by R.L. Polk, another industry research analyst.

That was after the new Hyundai Elantra won North American Car of the Year honors at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. And as company executives continued to make a case for how they can stretch the Hyundai brand from its original value positioning into what Hyundai of America CEO John Krafcik calls recognition as a "valuable brand" with a vehicle roster that runs from spartan to opulent.

Power's exhaustive surveying of U.S. automotive consumers led to its conclusion that Hyundai had the highest customer-retention rate last year among auto brands, with 64 percent, beating bigger competitors Ford and Honda, who scored 60 percent. BMW finished in a tie for fourth with 59 percent, with Hyundai's sibling brand, Kia.Continue reading...

The U.S. economic climes are growing about as balmy as the unseasonably warm weather expected next week when global automotive media and industry executives descend on the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. And car brands from Acura to Volvo are poised more than they have been in a few years to try to take advantage of the platform to launch new models, brag about technological innovations, tease with concept vehicles and spin their stories to several thousand curious journalists, bloggers, TV producers and hangers-on.

Overall, NAIAS will feel more like the golden days of yore than a Detroit show has in years. For example, Nissan is making a return to the exhibit after a couple years' absence during the Great Recession. Fuel economy and electrification will continue to be strong themes as they have been for the past few years, but with a slow but steady multi-year recovery in the U.S. market underway, auto brands will be emphasizing "happier" themes such as exterior-design departures and interior connectivity technologies.

Audi plans to use the show to unwrap a concept "Vail" version of its compact Q3 just for the U.S. market, where the company plans to introduce several more models in the years ahead as it tries to supplant BMW as the world's largest luxury-car maker by 2015. Audi sells only about half as many vehicles in the American market as BMW and Mercedes-Benz at this point, but the Volkswagen-owned brand has been growing by leaps and bounds in teh U.S. already. Audi executives have said they're also looking at the idea of making SUVs in the United States as its two German rivals do already.Continue reading...