If you work in advertising or the media and you haven't had the email yet, it's only a matter of time. It's the email that orders collective belt-tightening, a brake on all recruitment, perhaps mandatory redundancies and it's infiltrating in-boxes around town. Adopt the brace position.

What happens when you encourage creatives to develop business ideas? Ian Burrell finds out

The word is no words

Sex toy, pleasure enhancer, erotic stimulator, Rampant Rabbit. Call it what you will, it's a vibrator, and we don't like to talk about that sort of thing.

Not many advertisers stay married to the same ad agency for five years, let alone 25. But the relationship that Levi's has with Bartle Bogle Hegarty has done more than stand the test of time. It has set the advertising agenda and produced some of the most enduring and iconic campaigns of the last quarter of a century.

Knife-wielding, gun-toting, pit-bull-packing hoodies are assailing us from every angle. They're in the newspapers and on the television; the subject of police crackdowns, Government task forces and dinner-party debates.

The Prime Minister's appointments secretary is to leave Downing Street to be policy director for the Faith Foundation which is being set up by Tony Blair, sources have revealed.

Directed by Charles Shyer

Think of really great advertising by a brand and an agency, working together year in year out to create something fresh, different, culturally impactful over the course of, oh, a couple of decades. Not many brand advertising histories could claim that much. Levi's is one that can, with its ads from Bartle Bogle Hegarty being some of the most iconic and era-defining of their time.

The number of armed burglaries has risen to record levels, new crime figures show.

Kofi Annan has warned that winning the battle against Aids means acknowledging that homosexuals, prostitutes and injecting drug users are at particular risk and need protection.

SIX NEW advertising millionaires were created yesterday when Creston, the marketing group, bought DLKW Group, the agency behind the Halifax television ads starring its staff, Johnny Vaughn's Capital Radio breakfast show and Burger King, for up to pounds 38.3m.

ALL EFFECTIVE advertising executions stand on two legs: single- mindedness and salience. Give people more than one message on a poster or in a commercial and they'll miss them all. My old boss Sir Frank Lowe used to demonstrate this in talks by throwing a tennis ball to a member of the audience which they easily caught, and then throwing several at the same time and all balls were dropped.

Terry Ramsden, the financier, racehorse owner and convicted fraudster, cemented his return to the business community yesterday, taking a 10 per cent stake in Hansard Group, a public relations company.