Coca-Cola promises to reduce marketing to kids as part of global anti-obesity commitment.

Levi Strauss buys naming rights to planned new stadium of San Francisco 49ers.

Lay's reveals chip-flavor contest winner.

Abercrombie & Fitch draws fire for stocking only "skinny" sizes for women.

Activision Blizzard warns "World of Warcraft" is losing subscribers.

AT&T severely slashes Facebook Home phone prices.

BT enters British-sports broadcasting.

Claire's IPO will test market for debt-laden companies.

Ford takes over as title sponsor of Detroit's annual fireworks.

Google Maps will reportedly unveil new interface.Continue reading...

If love is the universal language, snacks may be the universal food. And that's one reason the spinoff of Mondelez International from Kraft Foods last year looks more and more like a good move, at least for Mondelez and its shareholders.

Mondelez's portfolio of global snack brands—ranging from Oreo to Cadbury to Trident—relies on emerging markets for about 40 percent of its revenue right now, and by 2020 the company projects that 110 million households in India, Russia and Brazil will move into the middle class, the socioeconomic stratum where serious snacking begins in most markets because consumers have achieved the economic wherewithal for recreational eating.

"As they do, we believe they'll step up their chocolate consumption by about three times," Bharat Puri, Mondelez's senior vice president of global chocolate, told analysts recently, according to Advertising Age.Continue reading...

Murmurs were afoot early on the street and on the tweet, thanks to Taco Bell's Facebook hint that fans should head to a pop-up store at New York City's Ariston Flowers in the Chelsea neighborhood, setting the Twitterverse aflutter.

The product: new Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos. The password: ask for the blue bouquet.

But just when things began to heat up at the flower shop, Taco Bell also was letting the whole country know about what likely will be its biggest new-product announcement of 2013. The Yum! Brands chain is hoping to tap into the same fervor for Cool Ranch as it did a year ago for the original Nacho Cheese flavored Doritos Locos Tacos, which kicked off a frenzy new Doritos-based-shell franchise.

And if the blue nail polish on today's Facebook announcement wasn't hint enough, Taco Bell is wooing the cool kids to Cool Ranch by appealing to hipsters — judging by its Super Bowl commercial, as a mindset and not necessarily just millennials.Continue reading...

Amazon bolsters challenge to Netflix with CBS deal, nabs top spot on Harris annual brand reputation survey and mobile retail satisfaction survey.

Alitalia considers giving up independence to stay viable.

American Express tests Twitter purchases by hashtag.

Apple CEO Tim Cook gets VIP invite to President Obama's State of the Union Address; Apple to webcast Cook's conference remarks today.

Auntie Anne's Pretzels can't get Chinese to bite.

Barclay's plans to cut 3,700 jobs and change focus.

BNY Mellon releases research about insurance industry challenges.

Carnival sees engine fire disable cruise ship in Gulf of Mexico.

Coca-Cola profits rise on higher case volume.Continue reading...

What does PepsiCo believe in even more than Beyonce? The answer might be crowdsourcing.

Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show served as the main kickoff to its huge investment in the globally popular entertainer with a concert that some felt usurped the game itself. But the walkup to her much-anticipated performance used a highly populist approach that underscored PepsiCo-Frito Lay's faith in the crowd as much as any pop star.

The bulk of the ad, produced by NYC-based Mekanism, featured a lightning-fast succession of Pepsi enthusiasts culled from more than 120,000 photos submitted to the brand via New York-based Olapic and Crowdtwist. Olapic collected and curated the pictures while CrowdTwist rewarded uploads through a point-based platform. Mekanism, as TIME puts it, took that material in a bid to manufacture "viral on demand" for the Pepsi brand.Continue reading...

TiVo settles patent lawsuit vs Verizon for $250.4M; Verizon will license TiVo technology.

McDonald's brings back annual Monopoly game contest for 20th edition across U.S.

Yahoo's Mayer will lay out vision at all-hands company meeting this week.

Kroger rolls out Simple Truth™ and Simple Truth Organic® private label in-store brands.

Lay's Potato Chips issues last call for consumers to submit next great potato chip flavor idea for a shot at $1 million payout.

Madame Tussauds Hollywood launches first-ever social media contest for 2013 figure.

Neiman Marcus reaches out to fashion bloggers.Continue reading...

With a new Wuhan plant capable of delivering 15,000 more tons of Lay's potato chips a year, it's no secret PepsiCo is hanging a lot of its hopes on China. With a market that currently only consumes about a fifteenth as many chips as the US, PepsiCo sees room to grow the Lay's brand.

Meanwhile, it's Pepsi beverage is facing a bit more of a struggle, in part because of stiffer competition from market leader Coca-Cola. So what's a global conglomerate brand umbrella to do? Make Pepsi-flavored Lay's of course. But now Lay's and Pepsi have found a unique way to endear the partnership to China's consumers. Continue reading...

There's nothing new about crowdsourcing product varieties anymore, but Frito-Lay is bringing an interesting twist to a promotion that it launched today: offering the winner of a new-flavor contest the option of a prize based on sales of the new potato-chip flavor that he or she inspires.

In its "Do Us a Flavor" campaign headlined by actress and restauranteur Eva Longoria and Food Network Iron Chef Michael Symon, the PepsiCo unit invites fans to submit their potato-chip flavor ideas via a Facebook app for a chance to win $1 million in grand-prize money — or one percent of their flavor's 2013 net sales, whichever is higher.

"We [already] have a lot of flavors that would make the one-percent option a bigger payout than the $1 million," Ram Krishnan, Frito-Lay's vice president of marketing, told brandchannel. "We're opening it up so that consumers can have a winning proposition."Continue reading...