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For years, Bryant Park Grill & Cafe in Midtown Manhattan has been one of the country’s top-grossing restaurants, the star property in Ark Restaurants’ portfolio of 20 restaurants across the United States. But what propelled it to the top has vanished. The tourists are gone, the office towers surrounding it are largely empty and the restaurant’s 1,000-seat dining room is closed. Instead, dinner is cooked and served on its patio, and the scaled-down restaurant brings in about $12,000 a day — an 85 percent plunge in revenue, its chief executive said. Five months into the pandemic, the drastic turn of...

In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including J.C. Penney, Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good. Many other large brands, like Victoria’s Secret and the Gap, have kept their high-profile locations closed in Manhattan, while reopening in other states. Michael Weinstein, the chief executive of Ark Restaurants, said he will never open another restaurant in New York. Of Ark Restaurants’ five Manhattan restaurants, only two have reopened, while its properties in Florida — where the virus is far worse — have expanded outdoor seating with tents and tables into their parking lots, serving almost...

GM, Ford feud over Super Bowl ad (Reuters) - A simmering feud between General Motors Co and Ford Motor Co heated up on Sunday as Ford objected to GM's Super Bowl advertisement for its Chevy Silverado pickup truck. The ad, which will run on NBC's television broadcast of the Super Bowl on Sunday, depicts an apocalyptic scene in which Chevrolet Silverado pickup trucks and their owners escape death and make it to a pre-arranged meeting point. But, one of their friends, identified as "Dave," who drives a Ford, doesn't make it to the meeting site, in the video that plays...

As Osama bin Laden watched his terrorist organization get picked apart, he lamented in his final writings that al-Qaida was suffering from a marketing problem. His group was killing too many Muslims and that was bad for business. The West was winning the public relations fight. All his old comrades were dead and he barely knew their replacements. Faced with these challenges, bin Laden, who hated the United States and decried capitalism, considered a most American of business strategies. Like Blackwater, ValuJet and Philip Morris, perhaps what al-Qaida really needed was a fresh start under a new name. The problem...

25 Horribly Sexist Vintage Ads by Oral Adams Since the 50’s, a lot has changed in way of women’s rights and their duties in and out of the house. I highly doubt any company could get away with phrases like “The Chef [mixer] does everything but cook – that’s what wives are for!” nowadays. Or how about an ad agency pitching a company an idea of a wife bent over her husband’s knee as he prepares to spank her.

Wall Street, it is said, is driven by the swing of the pendulum between two extremes -- excessive greed and excessive fear. And we have had plenty of greed, with the Dot-Com boom, followed by the mortgage boom. Each of these has been followed by a bust. The Dot-Com bust, together with 9-11, led the powers-that-be to try to re-stimulate the economy by artificially lowering interest rates, to the lowest level in a generation. This was combined with strong pressure on the lenders to make housing affordable for *all* Americans -- including, apparently, those who had no business borrowing in...

For the Chinese, starting in early February, this will be the Year of the Rat. But on Madison Avenue, it's more likely to be the year of the cornered rat. The rise of the Web is forcing ad executives to reinvent how they create ads and even changing the way some ad companies are structured. But until now, few advertisers have spent more than 5% to 10% of their marketing budgets online. With the growth of online video and social networking, ad experts expect that percentage to jump significantly this year. Softness in the economy will also likely drive more...

Woodstock Creator Tells DA That Funds Have Gone Missing A $40 Million Shortfall Where did Norman Hsu get his money? That has been one of the big questions hanging over the prominent Democratic fund-raiser, as reports have surfaced about hundreds of thousands of dollars he made in political donations, plus lavish parties, fancy apartments and a $2 million bond he posted to get out of jail earlier this month. New documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal may help point to an answer: A company controlled by Mr. Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run...

The United States Marine Corps and JWT are honored to announce that "The Few. The Proud. The Marines." has been nominated BEST SLOGAN for the Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame. More than just a slogan, these three sentences represent what Marines are all about, epitomizing the challenge of becoming (The Few), and the reward of being (The Proud), one of the elite (The Marines). Suffice it to say, Few slogans convey such a Proud tradition. With your help, we now have the opportunity to immortalize these words as an American cultural icon. The Marine Corps will compete with 26...

Sen. John McCain has scored an early victory in the race to line up major financial backers in the New York area — the backyard of Rudolph Giuliani, his potentially strongest rival for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008. McCain has enlisted as one of his national finance co-chairs Lewis Eisenberg, a multimillionaire from New Jersey who served as finance chairman for the Republican National Committee. Eisenberg was sought after by Giuliani, according to a 140-page White House strategy playbook belonging to the former New York City Mayor, which was recently leaked to the press. The playbook outlined Giuliani’s secret...

Mountain View, Calif. IN many ways, Larry Page and Sergey Brin seem an unlikely pair to lead an advertising revolution. As Stanford graduate students sketching out the idea that became Google, the two software engineers sniffed in an academic paper that "advertising-funded search engines will inherently be biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers." They softened that line a bit by the time they got around to pitching their business to venture capitalists, allowing that selling ads would be a handy safety net if their other, less distasteful ideas for generating revenue didn't pan out. Google...

NEW YORK, June 18 (Reuters) - American companies spend millions of dollars every year on slick advertising to market products from beer to luxury cars, but a new book tells them; Your Marketing Sucks. Marketing expert Mark Stevens believes car makers waste millions of dollars on advertising, sees fast food company McDonald's Corp. (NYSE:MCD - News) as adrift and scoffs at beer ads in his book, to be published by Crown Business July 15. As Stevens sees it, companies fall victim to silky-tongued Madison Avenue ad agencies more interested in winning Clio awards -- the industry's equivalent of the Oscars...

Web sites geared toward gays earn profits, respect SAN FRANCISCO — At the height of the dot-com boom, Lowell Selvin ran an Internet company with a Web site boasting 2.5 million registered users — an audience a survey showed was both trendsetting and unusually loyal. Yet as often as not, Selvin came away empty-handed in meetings with potential investors. Many venture capitalists just weren't ready to stake money on Gay.com. "We got calls from analysts and reviewers saying 'Your metrics are incredible, but there were one or two partners in the room who were fearful, homophobic, or whatever and...

You know the old joke, "I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out." Well, the other night, I tuned into a hockey game and smut broke out, all over. A confession: I don't ever watch 'regular' TV at home. It's not just that the quality of programming is poor (it is), or that I despise the politics of most of those involved in the industry (I do), it is the constant visual and verbal barrage of smut, sleaze and sex – and that's just the commercials. Having grown up in the '60s I am...

QUESTION: Isn't the devil behind all the confusion and fighting over Bible versions? ANSWER: Undoubtedly.