NASCAR brand refresh thwarted by P.R. crisis and YouTube takedowns after Saturday's fan-injuring accident during Nationwide race, while Danica Patrick is poised to make history as first female driver in pole position at Daytona 500. Dish Network, meanwhile, released "Memoriam" Daytona 500 campaign yesterday for its Hopper ad-skipping feature, a campaign that Fox has refused to run and Dish is trying to circumvent.

Microsoft joins list of hacked brands as Internet Explorer 11 rumored and Toyota Racing creates trackside app for Microsoft Windows 8.

Huawei unveils "Make it Possible" global branding campaign for Ascend P2 at Mobile World Congress, where Orange unveils own-brand 4G smartphone.

Coca-Cola forms major co-branding partnership in the Middle East.

Donald Trump tells the Financial Times his brand is worth $8 billion.

Dunkin' Donuts tops Brand Keys loyalty index for seventh straight year.Continue reading...

Burberry Chief Creative Officer Christopher Bailey promised back in September ahead of its global flagship store opening on London's Regent Street that Burberry would be stepping up its digital innovation lead even more. He wasn't kidding.

London Fashion Week kicked off Monday with Burberry's autumn/winter 2013 women's ready-to-wear show full of glossy trenchcoats, hearts, animal prints and polished metals. It's also taking a shine to latest in digital personalization: giving consumers the ability to order what they see on the catwalk straight from their mobile devices with a novel twist—customization using the brand's proprietary technology.

It's the latest example of how the Burberry brand is all in on tech, including its Art of the Trench and Burberry World digital platforms, pushing photos to Instagram, making contact with consumers across the social and mobile web. The fastest growing luxury brand on Interbrand's 2012 Best Global Brands list is now bridging social and mobile with its latest move: live streaming its fashion show on its website, on Facebook, on Twitter (a first, the brand believes, according to the New York Times) and in its digital-first flagship Regent Street store.Continue reading...

Crises beget winners as well as losers. One of the winners seems to be Ian Davis—if you can call leaping from the frying pan into the fire a way of coming out on top.

The non-executive chairman of BP has been hired by another stalwart of UK business, Rolls-Royce, to help the embattled luxury-car brand deal with allegations of possible bribery by some of its people overseas.

Davis has had experience dealing with "challenging situations" like the one facing Rolls-Royce. In fact, Davis was chairman of BP's Gulf of Mexico Committee, which was in charge of the energy company's overall, long-term response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizons disaster in the Gulf.

It's taken a lot of advertising (and an Olympics sponsorship) by BP, a $4.5 billion fine and billions more in outlays for cleanup in Gulf states, but BP seems to have survived the disaster—and Rolls-Royce believes Davis had a lot to do with it. Continue reading...

Oscar Pistorius was a man once known for being the fastest double-leg amputee on the planet. Now that the so-called Blade Runner has been charged with murder for the shooting death of his model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp early Valentine’s Day morning, his sponsors, who pay out about $2 million to Pistorius annually, are moving just as quickly as Pistorius to figure out how to deal with the sudden PR nightmare.

Nike’s attachment to Pistorius was compounded by the fact that an ad featuring the Olympian used the tagline, “I’m the bullet in the chamber.” It was pulled from Pistorius’s website on Thursday, Ad Age reports. The victim's tweets before her murder also created a social media nightmare for anyone or any company attached to the paralympic athlete.

"Nike extends its deepest sympathy and condolences to all families concerned following this tragic incident," his sponsor said in a statement. "As it is a police matter, Nike will not comment further at this time." Two other sponsors, Oakley and BP Global, both used the word “shocked” in their statements on the issue. Thierry Mugler fragrances had nothing to say other than it was waiting to see what happens with the investigation.

British Telecom, better known as BT, also went the “appalled” route with its statement: "Our thoughts are with all those affected by this tragedy. Given the ongoing legal proceedings, it would be inappropriate for us to comment further."Continue reading...

Coca-Cola has spent plenty of bucks on making iconic ads in the past, but its latest 60-second spot is coming from a low-priced source—a fan of the brand—while the company just revealed a trio of new cans designed by global creative director Marc Jacobs. The details on the latest moves in the cola wars:Continue reading...

UK retailers are not having an easy time of it, as the systematic shuttering of 164 Blockbuster stores is added to the list of foundering UK businesess.

The high-profile failing of music retailer HMV—which operates some 240 stores in Britain, Ireland, Singapore and Hong Kong—has already shut down all 16 of its Irish posts. The chain's owner, Hilco Consumer Capital, which specializes in buying bankrupt brands and owns Borders and Polaroid, is expected to decide the fate of HMV's other stores sometime this month. HMV's woes came on the heels of the bankruptcy of Jessops, a UK camera retailer, last week.

For Blockbuster, whose U.S. retail arm has been belly-up since 2010, the closure of UK stores comes as no surprise.Continue reading...

The old adage about mail being delivered whether there is rain, sleet or snow doesn't cover whether the letter carrier makes appointed rounds if the Postal Service is losing billions of dollars. 

The USPS, of course, has announced that as of August, Americans won’t be getting deliveries on Saturdays, due to the service losing $1.3 billion in the final quarter of 2012. (Holiday mailings were expected to stave off such massive losses.) and $16 billion in its previous fiscal year. (Esquire has an expansive piece out this month looking at the service's wide-ranging woes.) 

No hint of the service's troubles seems apparent on its Facebook page, which announces "6-Day Package/5-Day Mail Delivery" in a manner that almost seems to suggest it's an improvement. It also calls itself "the largest, most efficient postal company in the world" (with a retail network that is "larger than McDonald's, Starbucks and Wal-mart combined") and reminds Americans that a stamp that costs 46 cents in the U.S. is priced at an average of 93 cents elsewhere in the world.Continue reading...

BlackBerry 10 phones are available in Canada as of today. It's the company's home market, and the first place in North America where consumers can put the devices into action.

"Today is a day that many Canadians, especially members of Team BlackBerry, will never forget," the company blogged.

The debut is a significant moment for BlackBerry as it attempts to rebound in the mobile phone market it once pioneered. Its Super Bowl ad did not create much buzz, and the arrival of the keyboard-equipped BlackBerry Q10 in the crucial U.S. market is not expected until May or June, its CEO, Thorsten Heins, said today. (The Z10 is expected in the U.S. by mid-March.)

Without disclosing sales figures, the company released a statement by Heins that the Z10, which also launched last week in the UK, is off to a better sales start than all of its predecessors:

"In Canada, yesterday was the best day ever for the first day of a launch of a new BlackBerry smartphone. In fact, it was more than 50% better than any other launch day in our history in Canada. In the UK, we have seen close to three times our best performance ever for the first week of sales for a BlackBerry smartphone."Continue reading...