The decision was disclosed in Buffett's annual letter to Berkshire shareholders, released Saturday. The letter called Geico's brief foray into credit cards "a very expensive business fiasco entirely of [Buffett's] own making."

Since Berkshire took over Geico in 1996, the company has grown rapidly, thanks to low prices and an advertising budget that has grown 25-fold to $800 million.

Geico is best known for a series of television commercials featuring a gecko that talks with a Cockney accent. Since 2004, the company also has run spots on TV showing preppy cavemen protesting the claim that buying insurance at geico.com is "so easy a caveman can do it."

AUSTIN - While U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is hoarding money for a possible Republican runoff, campaign finance reports show Gov. Rick Perry has increased his spending on television commercials in hopes of winning Tuesday's primary outright.

A new poll released Wednesday indicates Perry could get his wish. The Rasmussen Reports survey found Perry leading in the race by 48 percent to 27 percent for Hutchison and 16 percent support for activist Debra Medina, with the remainder undecided. That represents a 4-point gain for Perry since the beginning of the month, according to Rasmussen.

Starbucks struck another blow in the fast-food coffee war Tuesday, saying it will sell its Seattle's Best Coffee drinks at 7,250 Burger King shops nationwide by September.

When added to Starbucks' nearly 11,200 U.S. coffee shops and the 9,000 Subway locations where Seattle's Best began selling last year, the coffee chain now has 27,450 U.S. outlets - easily outnumbering McDonald's in an espresso tangle the burger chain launched last year when it rolled out its McCafe drinks and advertising campaign.

Democrats are poised to launch an unprecedented three-pronged spending effort aimed mainly at Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, a billionaire former CEO who's already invested $39 million of her own money in her campaign.

The launch of three independent campaign committees, as confirmed by sources familiar with them, reflects worries among some Democrats that Attorney General Jerry Brown, who's expected to declare his Democratic candidacy for governor, won't be able to keep up with Whitman.

TO say that the folks on Madison Avenue who create television commercials have been busy lately is like saying New Orleans was pleased when the Saints won the Super Bowl. The debut of scores of campaigns, tied to the start of the Olympics on Friday, is part of what may be the most concentrated period of big-budget, big-name marketing efforts in years.

Super Bowl XLIV on Sunday was part of the frenetic stretch, which continues this weekend with the Winter Games and other sports programming, like the National Basketball Association All-Star Game and the Daytona 500.

There's not much more we can say about the Super Bowl television commercials that our colleagues at Media Decoder didn't already get to: Stuart Elliott live-blogged the advertisements here, and Bill Carter revealed the back story of the surprise Letterman-Oprah-Leno commercial here.

As disgruntled if dedicated 'Lost' geeks, we'd simply like to point you to two Super Bowl ads that seemed at least partly inspired by that ABC castaway adventure. The first is a Bud Light spot called 'Stranded' - ha, ha - in which a vaguely familiar-looking group of plane-crash survivors are more interested in partying and drinking beer than being rescued from their island paradise:

Never have so many people shown so little faith in Saints.

If you believe oddsmakers, the Indianapolis Colts will win today's Super Bowl by five points or more. And plenty of sensible folks believe it will be by plenty more.

I am not among the plenty.

My call: New Orleans 28, Indianapolis 24.

We all know why I am supposed to be dead wrong. The reason is 6-foot-5, weighs 230 pounds and does television commercials for MasterCard, Sony, Sprint, Gatorade, X-Box "... and that's just in the first half.

There was little ambivalence or hesitation at polling places around Massachusetts on Tuesday as voters selected a senator to succeed the late Edward M. Kennedy. After more than a week of nonstop television commercials, automated phone calls and even a campaign appearance by President Obama, voters were well aware that there was more at stake in this race than the fate of a single Senate seat.

In interviews around the state, voters made it clear they went to the polls with unusually firm ideas - for a special election, at least - about the health care bill.

(Updated with more context, comments from COO Turner, closing share price, in the first, second, fourth, fifth, and seventh through 10th paragraphs.)

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Apple Inc. (AAPL) recently asked Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to stop running television commercials that suggest its Macintosh computers are expensive, the latest indication that the rivalry between the companies is heating up. ...

During the NBA basketball finals, Magic Johnson has been a major part of the television coverage.

He has been commentating during halftime of the games and doing a ton of interviews.

None of the sports interviewers have asked Johnson about the commercials he is doing for, Jackson Hewitt, a tax refund anticipation company, or for Rent A Center.

The commercials run heavily in urban areas and target working poor. I've written a couple of articles about Johnson's involvement in the tax refund anticipation business, No response from Johnson or the people around him.

(CNN) -- A Connecticut woman pleaded for police to "please hurry" to save a friend from an attack by a pet chimpanzee, according to emotional 911 recordings released Tuesday by Stamford police.

"He's ripping her apart," Sandra Herold, 70, tells dispatchers about her pet, Travis.