Apple rumor created by Swedes as a prank goes viral.

BP nets $2.5bn in deal to sell Californian refinery business and Arco brand.

Canada's media ownership concentration criticized in new report.

Chad Johnson negates powerful personal brand as VH1 series cancelled.

Cosmopolitan founder Helen Gurley Brown passes, remembered, at 90.

Dewar's global brand ambassador chats with the New York Times.

Ford banks on 2013 Fiesta.

GE and Chobani take gold in Ace Metrix Olympics ad ranker.

HarperCollins plans pop-up record store to promote new book.Continue reading...

Fast-food giants share a not-so-secret recipe: make the up sell, adding fries to your bill or talking you into some kind of combination meal.

But the up sell isn’t working quite the way it used to. Consumers aren’t asking for "the #5 with fries" anywhere near as much as they used to, Fortune reports. A study by NPD Group finds that sales of combo meals at fast-food restaurants have gone down 12% in the last five years.

That means a billion fewer combo meals were ordered in the five-year period ending this past January than were ordered up in the five years before that. The lousy economy has something to do with it, but the study also showed that consumers would like to have more options in their combos.

The grand-daddy of the combo meal is the Happy Meal, which has been holding on for dear life. Revamped in time for the London Summer Olympics healthier menu marketing, it's been hit in markets such as Chile, where the government is now prohibiting restaurants (but it might as well say "McDonald's") from including toys with meals.Continue reading...

Japan's automakers are moving more and more of their "crown jewels" to the U.S. market, which promises to continue to transform the brands both home and abroad into more of a "Made in America" proposition than anyone would have imagined just a few years ago.

Honda plans to give the lead to its North American operations for a growing number of global vehicle-development projects of the type which traditionally were executed in Japan. Company executives hope the moves would help Honda fend off competitive challenges in the North American market and also hedge against a strong yen.

The U.S. R&D team, most of it located in Raymond, Ohio, already stands at about 2,000 people, and Honda could add to that for engineering and development work on the new-generation Acura NSX sports car, the next-generation Civic and other models, said Erik Berkman, the new president of Honda R&D Americas, according to Automotive News.

"As an organization, our U.S. facilities and the skill level of our engineers have achieved full citizenship in R&D," Berkman said. Honda already has been gearing up a huge shift of auto production to the United States from Japan because of the stubbornly strong yen, which makes U.S. manufacturing less expensive.Continue reading...

It's 7-Eleven Day, so slurp it up! Highlighting the obvious tie-in between its brand name and event marketing manna from heaven, 7-Eleven stores long ago picked July 11 (7/11) at the height of North America's summer to throw a party and drive customers to the Slurpee machine.

To celebrate the convenience store chain's 85th year in business, 7-Eleven is giving away free 7.11 (of course) ounce Slurpee drinks between 11 AM and 7 PM local time (not, alas, 7 AM-11 PM) on 7/11/12. Last year, 7-Eleven handed out 5 million Slurpee drinks on 7-Eleven Day. This year, how many do you think they expect to distribute? Why, 7 million, of course.Continue reading...

Research in Motion leadership squeaked through the company's annual presentation to shareholders Tuesday morning with a minimum of contention and even with its existing board of directors intact.

That doesn't mean shareholders who attended the meeting at its corporate hometown of Waterloo, Ontario, were at all happy with the cratering of the BlackBerry brand, RIM's huge financial losses, its announcement of massive layoffs, the musical-chair game of top management, the shrinking stock price, or the company's widely bemoaned executive decision to delay the launch of the crucial BlackBerry 10 phone until next year.

And they're certainly not happy with how the iPhone and Droid have eaten BlackBerry's lunch lately or how some corporate customers already are contingency planning for a day when BlackBerry might no longer exist or be viable.Continue reading...

Walmart's critics have beaten up on the company for a lot of things over the years — its environmental policies, the treatment of its female employees, corporate donations to conservative political groups. But now Walmart, apparently, has gone too far by advertising that it sells good steaks.

The chain was critiqued recently by a Phoenix-based blogger, for example, for "mak[ing] it appear" that diners of an upscale local restaurant, El Chorro, "were saying things about Walmart steaks like, 'It was one of the best filets I've ever had.'"

Such grilling aside, from Walmart's point of view, the marketing campaign to spread the work for its upgraded USDA Choice steaks has worked well. "It's been pretty amazing," Walmart CMO Stephen Quinn told Ad Age. "This one has really had a big impact so far."Continue reading...

Everyone knows the funniest Americans were born in Canada, so why not leverage that to bring a few tourism dollars north of the border?

Now playing in New York City: a series of spots featuring Canadian expat actor Eric McCormack, pitching the great white north to Manhattanites and visitors. The "Canada for Fun" tourism and branding campaign, from a consortium of Canadian tourism boards, aims to boost awareness of "why Canada is such a fun place to visit." It just launched in the New York metro market on NBC-owned TV stations; online at CanadaForFun.com and YouTube, where you can watch more of the spots; in taxis (where this expat Canadian caught the campaign); and on digital signage in commuter rail stations such as Penn Station. 

"Humour is an intrinsic part of our culture and is a great way to give Americans who haven't had a chance to visit Canada an inside look at their northern neighbours. We hope they enjoy Eric's take on our myths and realities," noted Greg Klassen, SVP of the Canadian Tourism Commission. Follow along on Twitter: @canadaforfun and #canadaforfun 

McDonald's Canada's latest TV commercial answers the question, "What's the one brand that can make strangers friends?" Hat-tip to McDonald's US social media director Rick Wion for flagging on Twitter.