Advertising Campaign

In a sign of the ramifications the budget standoff has beyond Wisconsin's borders, the Republican Governors Assn. plans to become the latest outside group to launch an advertising campaign in the state, supporting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's effort to end collective bargaining rights for public employees. The association's chairman, Rick Perry, announced the ad campaign during a briefing with reporters Monday in Washington, where the Wisconsin showdown has loomed over the annual meeting of state leaders.

Larry Jacobson proudly and unabashedly counts himself among a small number of dizzyingly devoted football fans: the Never Miss a Super Bowl Club. Jacobson has attended all 44, starting with the debut of the NFL's showcase event in 1967 at the Coliseum. His streak of perfect pigskin pilgrimage, the former junior high school mathematics teacher notes, provides "an opener for conversations, an opener to make friendships. " Jacobson, 71, has made a few ? and not only at Super Bowls.

One of the costliest lobbying wars in memory will crank into high gear this week as the Senate begins debate on the most sweeping overhaul of financial industry regulation in more than half a century. Wall Street and other critics are flooding the halls of Congress and mounting multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns to argue that the legislation would discourage innovation, reduce profits and harm U.S. competitiveness in the global economy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce alone reported spending $30.9 million on lobbying in the last three months, much of it on financial regulation, with major industrial and other corporations weighing in too. President Obama and congressional Democrats, meantime, are seizing every opportunity to warn that failure to create more effective financial oversight could bring on a repeat of the economic crisis that has cost millions of ordinary people their homes, jobs and financial security.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento is home to nearly 1 million Catholics. On a typical Sunday, less than 137,000 can be found in church. Now, using a strategy straight from the secular playbook, its leaders hope to lure back those who have drifted. The diocese and nearly a dozen others across the country are preparing to air several thousand prime-time TV commercials in English and Spanish, inviting inactive Catholics to return to their religious roots. In addition to Sacramento, dioceses in Chicago, Omaha, Providence, R.I., and four other cities will launch the "Catholics Come Home" advertising blitz during Advent, the period before Christmas.

Trodding heavily toward you like a 300-foot blue elephant in a band uniform, The Beatles: Rock Band video game will consume much of the industry's advertising bandwidth this summer ahead of its Sept. 9 release. A collaboration between MTV Games' Harmonix and the Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd.

Here's the beef: It's in KFC chicken. The marinade on the chain's new grilled chicken contains beef powder and rendered beef fat. And competitor El Pollo Loco wants you to know every finger-licking detail. The plucky Costa Mesa restaurant company is making those beef byproducts the centerpiece of a new advertising campaign tweaking KFC. "The use of beef ingredients in grilled chicken just seems wrong to me, and we believe most consumers would agree," said Steve Carley, chief executive of El Pollo Loco.

Mexican authorities said Tuesday that several of their country's best-known tourism spots are free of swine flu, as they scrambled to limit damage to the all-important travel industry due to the outbreak. Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said five top beach areas -- Puerto Vallarta, Los Cabos, Mazatlan, Zihuatanejo and Cozumel -- have not registered any confirmed cases of the H1N1 virus. "Tourist destinations are safe in Mexico," Cordova said. "People can come back with complete peace of mind.

Recently, as pharmaceutical companies engaged in another of their periodic benders of merger-mania, I spoke to a group of students at Scripps College in Claremont. The students were in exactly the demographic the industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to woo with drugs for attention-deficit disorder, depression and bipolar illness. And they weren't happy. The students' beef with Big Pharma is simple. The drugs don't work that well, or, if they do, only for a short while.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is betting that a new ad campaign in Asian languages will translate into more sales. The world's largest retailer Friday began running newspaper, radio and television advertisements in Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego and Houston, hoping to lure more Asian American shoppers to its stores. Print advertisements are also running in Taglish, a combination of Tagalog and English spoken by some Filipinos.