The King's Speech won four Oscars including Best Picture at the Academy Awards last night, unseating early favorite The Social Network; click here for more coverage.

Apple's iPad 2 rumored to come in white as design guru Jony Ive may return to the UK.

Audi counts on accelerated sales in the US.

Baseball Hall of Famer Duke Snider dies.

Berkshire Hathaway is looking for “more major acquisitions,” Warren Buffett says.

Blackstone wins bidding for U.S. assets of Centro for $9.4 billion.Continue reading...

Grilled cheese sandwiches are an acknowledged staple of many children's diets. Disney is arguably the best-known kiddie brand on the planet. So it's only natural that the two should come together somehow.Continue reading...

We all should have been listening to Magnum PI — er, Tom Selleck — in the early 1990s. It seems the mustachioed heartthrob's ads for AT&T could not have been more right about the future.

Also in Brand Bites this week: zombies, bananas, and minivans — oh my!Continue reading...

In a battle that reminds us a little of Starbuck's recent legal action against a British coffee shop, a burger joint in Brooklyn (Brooklyn Burger) is being sued for using the "the classic cursive 'Brooklyn' lettering made famous by the Dodgers." When the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn that is, which is more than a half century ago. 

So is the team in the right or is it just bitter about how its season ended? Or is there more going on here than meets the eye? Also, it appears the burger joint benefits from the same trademark protections it's decrying.Continue reading...

Brand managers know they’re taking a big leap of faith when they make huge investments in celebrity-designer lines and personal endorsements by superstars.
But Wal-Mart corporate (and Walmart, the retail brand) clearly believe that it’s still early enough in the career of Justin Bieber to take a flyer on his continued innocence — at least for a while.

The world’s largest retailer has forged a near-exclusive arrangement with the 16-year-old teen-heartthrob singer from Canada heading into the holiday season, including being the sole distributor of his new album (My Worlds Acoustic, teased during the World Series) starting Nov. 26, as well as related add-ons such as a Bieber-inspired unisex fragrance line and even nail polish (with Nicole by OPI).

Having already featured Bieber on its Soundcheck platform, the house that Sam Walton built is latching onto the lad while he’s still a lad — perhaps because the last time the retailer signed on with a tween sensation, it didn’t go too well.Continue reading...

Cablevision maintains subscriber base in wake of Fox standoff.

Chrysler seeks bank loans before possible stock sale in 2011.

DirecTV drops Comcast's G4 channel in latest tussle between media giants.

Discovery and Oprah Winfrey reveal programming details for OWN, Winfrey's cable channel debuting Jan. 1st.

Disney merges TV distribution and home entertainment units.

Gallup pollsters expect the Republican brand to win big in U.S. elections today, while Google helps voters with voting locator.

GM terminates 500 dealers, over politicians’ objections.Continue reading...

Speculation ran rampant in auto-marketing circles about what Joel Ewanick and Chris Perry, once allied at Hyundai, would to do jerk Chevrolet’s marketing forward into addressing the needs of the present moment.

The brand’s marketing was a disappointing hodge-podge for most of the last few years. But that was before former Hyundai USA marketing chief Ewanick became Chevy’s CMO last spring and, last summer, brought Perry in from Hyundai to run the Chevrolet division.

A beginning of the answer was revealed during the kick-off to the World Series Wednesday night on FOX, with the first TV ads under the brand’s new don't-call-it-a-tagline: "Chevy Runs Deep." They were the kickoff to Chevrolet’s new advertising campaign which, not all that surprisingly, will rely on some of its old approaches, as Perry told brandchannel.Continue reading...

"Take me out to the ball game" has new meaning as Facebook (and Twitter) change the way fans 'watch' the World Series. As the World Series opened in San Francisco baseball fans in the stands were outfitted with smartphones and laptops while virtual fans congregated on social networking sites to share every pitch, hit, strike and out. MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman cites Facebook and mobile as an increasingly important hub for fans, telling USA Today: "Baseball is well suited to constant updates for every pitch, and the smartphone is the ideal vehicle to view live entertainment."

Facebook is also an increasingly important player in the emergence of e-commerce store-fronts, which began over a year ago when 1-800-Flowers launched a store powered by Alvenda – the beginning of sales transaction within the FB environs. One drawback, however: Alvenda uses Adobe Flash.Continue reading...