Pierce Mattie Public Relations New York & Los Angeles

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Brands, New York Times: Media & Advertising section. Keller Fay asks people to keep a diary of conversations that mention products or brands and later asks them to recount details. Six months and more than 18,000 people later, Keller Fay is marketing its data to companies as a unique window into consumers’ heads.

• Alexa is 100% wrong and you can "game it" with as few as three machines--or so I've been told, Calacanis.com : Alexa does not work at all and we should not even recognize it as valid anymore from what I've learned.

• The Problem With Old Media, according to Content Matters: Last week's NY Times article, “For Wallflowers, a Time to Dance” described how some old media companies have become the darlings of private equity firms. That comes as no surprise to anyone who has watched the private equity dollars flow to the content space in recent years.

• NBC Gets in 'Smoking' Habit, Zap 2 IT: New Publicist-Centered TV show based on "Thank You for Smoking," based on the Christopher Buckley novel and its movie adaptation, which was in theaters early this year. Former "Six Feet Under" and "West Wing" scribe Rick Cleveland will write the pilot script and serve as an executive producer.