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M&S bonus decision signals trouble ahead
Marks & Spencer will announce profits of £1bn or so for 2007 this week, a figure not seen since 1998, the height of former boss Sir Richard Greenbury's reign. But it won't be trebles all round, rather one of bonuses being slashed, as newly-anointed executive chairman Sir Stuart Rose warns of troubles ahead.

Analysts are already saying that M&S profits will fall by £200m in 2008 as the high street grinds to a halt, Rose would undoubtedly settle for that. He fears things might be much worse.

Technically a recession is two quarters of 'negative' growth. In fact the service-based and globalised economy is so complex these days that you can have a large dose of misery without that.

The facts are obvious: retail sales are drying up, credit is in short supply, the prices of basic items like food and energy are rising at rates not seen since the 1970s and house prices are falling rapidly.

Even worse, for many people and certainly the government, unemployment has risen in each of the last three months.

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King told a Commons committee last week that he wasn't able to do much about it; his job was to try to control inflation (even though it's going to move outside his 2% limit) and what was a happening was a necessary "rebalancing" of the economy.
It all adds up to a big "Ouch!"

Suddenly Yahoo! is a hot company
Microsoft may have wanted to swallow it for $47bn (and still might) but suddenly the world is queuing up to do deals with Yahoo! to put Google-style ads on its search results.

WPP announced last week that it was entering a partnership with Yahoo! to give it greater access to automatic ad placement. And on Sunday, Microsoft said that it was interested in buying Yahoo!'s search business to create a Google rival.

This is really why Microsoft wanted to buy the whole business, but why should Yahoo! sell (to Microsoft and WPP anyway) the most desirable bit?

Well, maybe Yahoo! co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang sees other aspects of Yahoo! as more promising.

The company has spent a fortune recently adding content and extra layers of functionality to its website and Yang may feel that monetizing this is a better way forward than competing with Google on search ads, as suggested by his two-week ad placement deal with Google.

All these moves follow the intervention by US investor Carl Icahn in the affair, after he bought $1.5bn of Yahoo! shares.

Septuagenarian Carl is known as an 'activist' investor, and he's certainly living up to his reputation.

Why did De Nardis really quit Aegis?
Aegis Media global chief executive Mainardo de Nardis left the company in a hurry last week, without, as they say in that slightly damning phrase, a job to go to.

Which is slightly odd as Aegis has been doing exceptionally well recently and few people doubt that Mainardo has been a big factor in this.

There are other reasons too: the business has confounded the sceptics and moved late but successfully into market research through its Synovate company.

And its plethora of bets on digital media agencies seem to have paid off, providing a nice cushion against the migration of business from its conventional media planning and buying agencies Carat and Vizeum.

But Mainardo was important. So what did he do wrong?

Well one theory doing the rounds of the Euro-gossips centres around a possible suggestion to CEO Robert Lerwill that he ought to do a deal with Vincent Bollore of Havas, or at least allow Bollore some board representation.

Lerwill, of course, has set his face against 29.9% shareholder Bollore and you can see why he doesn’t want to allow Bollore to dominate Aegis without making a full bid -- which he has succeeded in doing at Havas.

Also, Lerwill probably can't see the logic of tying up with a company with its base in creative agencies. The media and digital boys rule the roost these days. Even WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell would probably listen politely to anyone who offered to buy some of his creative agencies for the right money.

So where will Mainardo end up? Havas, by any chance? Or even WPP, which would love to buy Aegis but can't see a way forward without the regulators getting interested.

Stephen Foster is a former news editor of ±±¾©Èü³µpk10, former editor of Marketing Week and Evening Standard ad columnist. He is a partner in Editorial Partnership and writes the blog and Politics of the Media for Brand Republic.