Advertising Age to Print Every Other Week

Advertising Age, the trade publication introduced in 1930, announced Monday that it would publish its print edition every other week rather than weekly.

The magazine, the largest publication in the ad trade field, will publish 25 issues in 2014, according to an email sent to subscribers on Monday, compared with 46 in 2013. (Advertising Age typically combined weekly issues in July, August, November and December.)

The minimum number of pages in each issue “will increase by 50 percent,” the email said, and the articles will be “supported by richer visuals and deeper data.”

The print edition of Advertising Age had been weekly for almost its entire history, except for a period in the mid-1980s when it was published twice weekly.

The decision by Crain Communications, the parent of Advertising Age and its website, adage.com, is another example of the changing economics of print publishing in an increasingly digital world. It comes after consumer publications like New York magazine reduced their frequencies in print.

It is “a big decision, but the right one for everything we’re doing right now,” Allison P. Arden, vice president and publisher of Advertising Age in New York, said in a phone interview Monday afternoon.

The cutback is “iterating on” the redesign of Advertising Age that was introduced in September 2012, Ms. Arden said, which included a resizing of the print edition as well as a shift in its focus from breaking news to analysis, centered on “more magazine-style content.”

The goal is fewer but larger print issues that are “more robust,” Ms. Arden said.

“We want to make sure we’re using every platform to the best of its ability,” she said.

The principal competitor of Advertising Age, Adweek, published by Prometheus Global Media, is a print weekly. As Advertising Age used to do, Adweek combines some weekly issues in the summer and around Christmas so it does not publish 52 weekly issues a year.

Advertising: Campbell Bets on the Wisdom of a Child

Updates to give the decades-old characters slimmer silhouettes and more contemporary looks were met with dismay among nostalgic older consumers and shrugs from younger consumers.

In a multimedia campaign that begins this week, Campbell Soup has decided to shelve the venerable brand mascots in favor of a modern-day boy, age around 8, who advises parents on what to feed their hungry offspring.

In a nod to the Campbell Kids, the new character is named the Wisest Kid in the Whole World; in another element of continuity, the campaign keeps the longtime brand theme, “M’m! M’m! Good!”

Executives at Campbell Soup and BBDO New York, the agency creating the campaign, dismiss suggestions that the name is evocative of the Most Interesting Man in the World, the popular brand character for Dos Equis beer. Rather, they say, the young guru is meant to personify the appetite that boys and girls have for Campbell’s condensed soups, like chicken noodle and tomato, as well as remind parents that a bowl of hot soup makes an appealing alternate meal to youthful favorites like fast food and pizza.

“Who knows more about what kids like than kids?” Ed Carolan, president for United States retail at Campbell Soup in Camden, N.J., asked.

“Moms and dads still struggle with what we call the real-time dilemma at mealtime: they want to be happy about what their kids eat, but the kids have to like it,” Mr. Carolan said. “Soup is an option they’ll feel good about serving to the kids, and the kids are happy.”

Morgan Seamark, executive vice president and senior director at BBDO New York — part of the BBDO North America division of BBDO Worldwide, owned by the Omnicom Group — said: “Parents have more options than ever to feed their kids. Maybe soup fell down the list of potential things to serve. We want to remind moms and dads that kids love Campbell’s soups. If you want to know what kids really like, don’t guess or make an assumption; ask a kid, and not just any kid, ask the Wisest Kid in the Whole World.”

The character is appearing in commercials along with print and online ads and will be featured on an app and at events. He will also have a presence in social media like blogs, Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter.

In addition to peddling what Campbell Soup calls its eating soups — heritage products like chicken noodle and newcomers like three soups with Super Mario Brothers shapes (“Achieve many levels of deliciousness,” the Wisest Kid says) — the character appears in ads with recipes for cooking soups like cream of mushroom; in one ad, for potpies made with cream of chicken soup, he asks, “What is the sound of one mouth watering?”

Plans call for the ads to be the largest single campaign within a category of Campbell Soup business lines known as U.S. soup and simple meals. The company spent $200.9 million last year on ads for soup in major media, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, compared with $229.9 million in 2011; those figures include spending on other soups in addition to condensed, among them ready-to-serve.

In the 2014 fiscal year, which began on July 29, Campbell Soup intends to increase its total marketing spending to $440 million to $450 million, compared with about $400 million in the 2013 fiscal year.

Although Campbell Soup has embarked on a diversification strategy, making acquisitions like Plum Organics and bringing out new products like V8 Complete Nutrition Bars, soup still is its biggest business line, accounting for about 36 percent of total sales. After struggling to turn around declines in demand for its mainstay condensed soups, the company has begun to see signs of progress; in the 2013 fiscal year, which ended on July 28, sales of the red-and-white soups rose 2 percent compared with the 2012 fiscal year.

“It’s a growing business,” Mr. Carolan said, and the new campaign has a “springboard to build on that momentum.”

The Wisest Kid campaign replaces ads, carrying the theme “It’s amazing what soup can do,” that were created by BBDO New York and Y&R New York, part of the Y&R unit of the Young & Rubicam Group, owned by WPP. Y&R New York is now focused on creating ads for new products like Campbell’s Go soups in pouches, which are aimed at millennial consumers in their 20s and 30s.

Other agencies working on the Wisest Kid campaign, in addition to BBDO New York, include Proximity Worldwide, the digital arm of BBDO Worldwide; MEC, part of the GroupM unit of WPP, for media services; and Weber Shandwick, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, for public relations.

The new brand mascot may be wise, but he is certainly not a wiseguy or wiseacre. Unlike the smart-aleck children who appear in packaged-food ads from mainstream marketers like the Kraft Foods Group, the low-key humor in the Wisest Kid ads reflects the more traditional corporate personality of Campbell Soup.

“We want to make sure the kid is not annoying,” Mr. Seamark said, adding that the campaign was intended to be lighthearted. Mr. Carolan concurred, saying: “Mealtime is fun. Food is fun.”

In another way, however, the campaign takes an up-to-date approach, by portraying fathers as well as mothers as family meal-makers. That “is designed to reflect the modern face of America,” Mr. Seamark said.

Advertising: With Change Coming, Aetna Targets Employers

But because a majority of Americans are insured through their employers, the insurance companies have to reach several audiences. Speaking to human resources professionals, health care providers and policy makers is still an important part of many insurance companies’ marketing plans.

Aetna, one of the largest of the companies, will introduce a new campaign on Tuesday aimed at those groups. It will highlight the company’s goal of cutting billions of dollars of expenditures through so-called Big Data, electronic health records and other technologies as well as encouraging better coordination among health care providers. The campaign, called “Our Healthy,” will run online, in print and on mobile devices through the end of 2013.

“We believe that the health care system is desperately in need of improvement,” said Robert Mead, the senior vice president of marketing, product and communications at Aetna. Mr. Mead cited a report by the Institute of Medicine that tallied more than $760 billion in health care “waste” created annually as a result of consumer fraud, unnecessary procedures and excessive administrative costs.

The campaign was created by OgilvyOne in New York and is an extension of a consumer campaign called “What’s Your Healthy?” that Aetna began earlier this year. Both “What’s Your Healthy?” and “Our Healthy” are part of a $50 million advertising and marketing strategy for the company.

“If you’re a consumer, you don’t know what things cost,” Mr. Mead said. “You don’t know what things are worth. You don’t always know how to get the most value out of the health system. We have to bring everybody to the table.”

Mr. Mead said the campaign also stressed the need for health care providers to shift to a model known as “accountable care,” which shifts their reimbursement models for health care professionals from being paid for the volume of services they perform to being paid based on the outcomes of patient care. Accountable care systems are usually linked to technologies that help health care providers measure performance and manage patient data. Aetna has 27 accountable health care agreements with hospitals and other health care providers around the country.

A video for the “Our Healthy” campaign features Mark T. Bertolini, the chief executive of Aetna, explaining the company’s goals. “Unless you fix that health care system, you cannot fix the economy,” Mr. Bertolini said in the video. “If we fix just 20 percent of it, we could pay for the Affordable Care Act. We could insure everyone without increasing taxes.”

Like other insurance companies, Aetna has over the last few years been ramping up its technical products and services. It created Healthagen, a division of the company that sells health technology services to consumers and providers, like a mobile application that helps patients assess their symptoms and find doctors.

“The fee-for-service model is broken,” Mr. Mead said. “The Affordable Care Act encourages the system to move to accountable care,” he added. “The challenge with that is that doctors and hospitals need technology and support to make that work.”

But more technology and more data may not solve the problem of waste in health care, said Robert S. Huckman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the faculty co-chairman of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Initiative. “When you’re talking about having to manage waste in the system, most would agree that a lack of coordination rests at the heart of a lot of it,” he said. “Data without an educated way of querying that data is not helpful. It is a start.”

While insurance companies like Aetna have access to vast amounts of patient data that could be used to manage costs, according to Mr. Huckman, the economic impact of even widely adopted technologies like electronic health records is still unclear. “Within providers and within a hospital, the electronic records have made greater inroads. But the question of moving toward greater coordination and greater interoperability is an issue we are still grappling with.”

The cost of health care, however, is something everyone can agree is too high, Mr. Huckman said: “I think the cost issue is most salient right now for most Americans. It hits you front and center when you look at some of the prices.” He noted how costs could vary widely depending on where a person lived and who their insurer was. “It shouldn’t vary that much,” Mr. Huckman said. “The cost of a product on Amazon is the same no matter where I buy it from. It does defy a little bit of explanation.”

Advertising: An Old Campaign Learns a New Song

A BRAND once lovingly mocked for commercials proclaiming it as “the freshmaker” is refreshing its approach to marketing.

The brand is Mentos, sold by Perfetti Van Melle, which became famous — or notorious, depending on your perspective — for a series of commercials from the 1990s. The cheesy spots for the Mentos flagship product, chewy mints that come in rolls, were criticized and celebrated for their ham-handed selling style, straight from the 1950s; the corny Mentos slogan, “The freshmaker”; their hokey story lines, mostly centered on mix-ups and youthful mischief; and the silly Mentos jingle, with lyrics that seemed to have been written by someone for whom English was a second language (“It doesn’t matter what comes, fresh goes better in life”).

This week, Mentos is introducing a campaign for the chewy mint rolls that is meant to evoke the upbeat mood and cheerful tone of the original work while, executives hope, slicing off chunks of the cheese. The campaign is the first from a new creative agency for the Mentos brand, the New York office of McKinney, part of Cheil Worldwide, which is taking over from the Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

The centerpiece of the new campaign, which carries the theme “Roll with it,” is a commercial that is the return to American television advertising for Mentos. The spot is to run on cable channels that are watched by the target audience of teenagers and 20-somethings, which include the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network, BET, Comedy Central, FX, MTV, the Nick at Nite block on Nickelodeon and VH1.

The new commercial, like its predecessors, features a fresh-faced, mint-mad youth who gives strangers the “thumbs-up” sign that symbolizes optimism — while also serving as a device to remind consumers they can use their thumbs to pop a Mentos chewy mint into their mouths.

This time, however, the oddball jingle is replaced with a song, written for the commercial by Beacon Street Studios, and the story line is less hokey: the youth skateboards past a colorful collection of characters at Venice Beach before falling, figuratively and literally, for a similarly fresh-faced young woman.

Another way the cheese quotient is reduced is that the 2013 spot is 15 seconds long, compared with 30 seconds for the original commercials.

Perfetti Van Melle plans to spend more than $30 million in the next 12 months to advertise Mentos brand products, which include new breath mints in addition to the chewy mints, as well as pellet gums like Mentos Pure Fresh. (A stick gum, Mentos UP2U, was introduced in 2011, but has been discontinued.) According to Kantar Media, a unit of WPP that tracks ad spending, Perfetti Van Melle spent $24.3 million last year to advertise Mentos products in major media, compared with $19.7 million in 2011 and $14.1 million in 2010.

The Mentos campaign is another example of a trend on Madison Avenue known as comfort marketing, which has gained popularity in the five years since the financial crisis of 2008. Advertisers are rummaging through their attics for vintage pitches, hoping that invoking fond memories of the past may help shoppers feel better about buying products now. And to counter perceptions that brands ladling out heaping helpings of nostalgia are too outdated, the ads are updated and refreshed for contemporary sensibilities.

“We wanted to do what was right for the brand today,” said Maurice Herrera, vice president and head of marketing for Mentos and Perfetti Van Melle USA.

“The freshmaker” generated “positive, quirky attributes” for the brand, he added, and it cast “a halo onto the brand, a positive one, that allowed us to go into gum.”

“But it also posed a challenge for the brand because it suggested the benefit was ‘We make things better,’ ” Mr. Herrera said, which was widely perceived as “an overpromise.”

Another challenge came when research among consumers in their teens and 20s showed that “more than half the millennials don’t associate ‘The freshmaker’ with the brand,” he added.

Replacing that theme with “Roll with it” speaks to the millennial generation’s “positivity,” Mr. Herrera said, and to “the point of view of the brand.”

Alex Van Gestel, managing director for McKinney New York, said the new campaign includes “some of the DNA from where the brand was in the past” including its “European sensibility,” reflecting how Mentos, and the original commercials, came from Europe.

“But as students of advertising, there’s also something new we want to create,” Mr. Van Gestel said, centered on “fun and youthful optimism,” adding: “You can’t over-intellectualize in this category. It’s a mint, a joyous experience.”

In another instance of comfort marketing, New World Pasta plans this week to start running a commercial, by Millennium Communications in Syosset, N.Y., that is based on a familiar spot from the 1960s and 1970s declaring Wednesday to be “Prince spaghetti day.” The new commercial will interweave material from the original with new material, bringing back Anthony Martignetti, who appeared at age 12 in the original spot, filmed in Boston by Venet Advertising.

Other agencies will also work on the new Mentos campaign, on tasks like print and digital ads and social media. They include Mongo Industries; R/GA, part of Interpublic; and TracyLocke, part of the Omnicom Group.

Advertising: A Soft Sell for Air Fresheners, With Joan Rivers in Reality Show Spoofs

CAN a frank, bawdy comedian and her equally outspoken daughter find happiness selling air fresheners? And can a maker of air fresheners find happiness with such seemingly unlikely pitchwomen? When the product-peddling aspects of the advertising can be soft-pedaled — as now occurs increasingly on Madison Avenue, in a trend known as content marketing — the answer may be “yes.”

The comedian is Joan Rivers, who, with her daughter, Melissa Rivers, are to appear in a series of humorous online video clips that promote the Renuzit line of air fresheners sold by Henkel. The seven planned episodes of the Web series will spoof “The Bachelorette” and other romance-centric reality competition shows on television by presenting 18 hunky young men competing for a chance to date Joan Rivers, who is advised during her “journey” — the Web series mockingly appropriates the trappings of its target — by her daughter.

The Web series, titled “Romancing the Joan,” serves up vintage Rivers, both mother and daughter, playing up the laughs as it plays down the commercial aspects. In one episode, Joan Rivers describes a romantic moment as being “like ‘Eyes Wide Shut,’ but with heterosexual tension.” In another episode, she confides, “If the doctor had left my tear ducts, I’d be crying now.”

Melissa Rivers, for her part, canoodles with a contestant behind her mother’s back, warns Joan during the penultimate episode that “we need to have a finale, or we don’t get paid” and reminds the contestants: “We’re sponsored by an air freshener. It’s on your call sheets.”

“Romancing the Joan,” with a budget estimated at $1.5 million, is being created and produced for Renuzit by SheKnows, a publisher of Web sites like SheKnows, allParenting and Chef Mom. SheKnows has previously developed online series for marketers like Canon, LG, Procter & Gamble and Welch’s.

“Romancing the Joan” is intended to complement conventional ads for Renuzit, carrying the theme “Choose them all,” to be introduced soon by Pereira & O’Dell, an agency in San Francisco. In those ads, each of the 18 Renuzit scents appears next to a hunky young man; “Romancing the Joan” turns each hunky contestant into a personification of a scent like After the Rain Ryan, Hawaiian Oasis Heath and Raspberry Richard.

SheKnows and Renuzit were brought together by the brand’s media agency, OMD, part of the Omnicom Group, which has been a prominent player in the content marketing realm. Content marketing, also known as branded content, pairs products and media companies for ads that are primarily meant to be entertaining or informative, seeking to avoid the hard-sell tactics that turn off most consumers.

“It seemed like a natural fit,” said Jeff Huffman, director for air care marketing and innovation at the Henkel Consumer Goods unit of Henkel in Scottsdale, Ariz., because the participation of Joan and Melissa Rivers “could really help us create some buzz.”

Also, Ms. Rivers “overindexes against our air-care target,” he added, which, translated from marketing-speak, means that the consumers at whom Henkel aims Renuzit ads watch episodes of TV series like “Fashion Police” and “Joan Knows Best” more than the general population.

There was “a lot of learning, a lot of late-night conversations” involved in the Web series, Mr. Huffman said, “but it was well worth it at the end.” That was partly because Henkel had to “release a little bit of creative control,” he added, and partly because the contents of the videos are “a little more racy” than the company is used to.

Still, “we’re comfortable with it,” Mr. Huffman said, because “we knew going into it that it’s Joan’s persona, that she’d be pushing the boundaries.”

“She is who she is, a feisty 80-year-old lady who works very hard,” he added. “A tame Joan would come off as not Joan, and not authentic.”

Samantha Skey, chief revenue officer at the New York office of SheKnows, said: “As brands make more branded content, they’ll be a little more comfortable with the funny. We hope it works; it’ll allow us to make cooler content.”

“The spoofing of reality TV and the playing with pop-culture memes should help achieve the brand objective, to cut through and get a wide audience,” Ms. Skey said.

Teasers to promote “Romancing the Joan” are to begin appearing this week in social media. The initial two episodes of the Web series are to make their debut on sheknows.com on Sept. 9, with all seven — about 38 minutes, in total — to run by Sept. 30.

Joan Rivers said she was pleased with how “Romancing the Joan” turned out because she and Melissa “could be ourselves” and “they spared no expense; they didn’t cheese out on anything.”

Joan Rivers also praised how, with content marketing, the sponsor is “not slapping you over the head” with a sales spiel. Her daughter echoed her, saying: “It’s branded content, but the operative word is ‘content.’ That makes it more fun.”

Speaking of fun, Joan Rivers left several voice messages on a reporter’s work phone because, she explained, “you might want some jokes” to accompany this article.

Most of what she said was too liberally peppered with sex for a family newspaper, but what follows are a couple of the cleaner jests. She said she wanted to be on a dating show “because all the guys I meet on Grindr are gay,” referring to the dating app for gay men.

“I’m just looking for a couple hours of fun and a new safe word,” she added.

Advertising: To Put Puerto Rico Onscreen, the Right Brands

The story, a family-friendly romantic comedy, follows Mr. Miranda’s character, Raúl, and a small group of friends who come together to help him on his mission to send letters to all 200 of the women named María Sanchez who live in Puerto Rico. His hope is that one of the letters will reach his beloved. The film also stars Jaime Camil, Mayra Matos, Monica Steuer and Dayanara Torres.

The film, which made its debut in New York in June and will have its theatrical release in Puerto Rico on Sept. 12, was financed in part through product placement and brand partnerships, said Roberto Alcazar, an executive producer. “It’s not only the brands in the film,” Mr. Alcazar said. “It’s the whole plan of creating a marketing strategy so they can use themselves in the film’s assets.”

Many of the products seen in the film are from Puerto Rican brands like Banco Popular and Bacardi. Bruno Irizarry, who wrote and directed the film, said he wanted to incorporate brands that were “everyday products that everybody uses.”

“That was one of the first things that I was very specific about,” he said. “How to bring in partners that support the arts and what we wanted to do, but make it not in your face.”

The product placement is subtle. In one scene, the group eats lunch prepared by a roadside vendor who uses Goya seasoning when he cooks. In another scene, which takes place in a bar in New York, the characters drink alcohol from Diageo. Raúl and his friend Juan, played by Mr. Camil, work at Banco Popular.

Mr. Alcazar said the film was made for about $1.2 million, which included money from private investors and advertisers and the Puerto Rico Film Commission.

“My goal was not just to get money, but to create a platform where we were going to get sponsors to be part of the marketing team,” Mr. Irizarry said. To that end, some of the brands will also help market the film. A.T.M.’s for Banco Popular will feature ads promoting the film, and the bank will give away tickets to customers named María Sanchez. Banco Popular also provided the filmmakers with billboard space and a float in the National Puerto Rican Day parade in New York in June. Mr. Alcazar described the parade as the “biggest platform to promote a Puerto Rican film in New York.”

Digital banner ads, film trailers and behind-the-scenes videos will be displayed on advertisers’ social media channels. Advertisers including Target Rent a Car and Bacardi will host private screenings of the film. Goya will have promotional materials for the film on supermarket shelves where its products are sold.

Mr. Irizarry said he estimated the total value of these brand partnerships was about $300,000 in cash and related marketing. Additional brands featured in the film include the newspaper El Nuevo Día, Toro Verde Nature Adventure Park and the Villas del Mar Hau hotel. With the exception of El Nuevo Día, which was both an editorial and brand partnership, all of the featured brands paid for their inclusion in the film.

Manuel Chinea, chief operating officer for Popular Community Bank, the name for Banco Popular in the United States, said the film was “one of those projects that connects the island to the mainland.”

“We felt that the appeal of the movie was going to be to a wider audience in the U.S., not just to Puerto Rico,” Mr. Chinea said. “The bank has always been committed to supporting entrepreneurs and individuals who are doing things in creative ways.”

Being a part of the film could also help the bank extend the awareness of its brand to new customers in the United States, Mr. Chinea said. “As we look to be more efficient and effective with our marketing dollars as traditional media loses effectiveness, we certainly need to find new ways of connecting with our audience,” he said.

Luis Álvarez, a vice president at Méndez & Company, a distributor for Diageo products, agreed. “Marketing and communications have become so exploited and so badly used that one has to find a way to do it honestly and sincerely,” he said.

Gabriel Reyes, the press director for the New York International Latino Film Festival and the president of Reyes Entertainment, said filmmakers were increasingly using brand partnerships to secure funding for their films. “I think independent producers now that really go out and raise money are becoming a lot more savvy about how they can go and take advantage of these opportunities,” Mr. Reyes said.

Finding organic ways to put advertisers into a script is critical to making the product integration seem natural, he said.

“We know people cook with Goya,” Mr. Reyes said. “It’s not some foreign brand that no one has seen.” But perhaps the best way, he added, to get an advertiser to sign on for a brand partnership is to have a well-known actor in the film: “In this case it was Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s easier to get that deal than if it was somebody out of the blue.”

Advertising: Bass Updates Penny Loafer For Next Generation

While the 77-year-old penny loafer is instantly recognizable, no advertising campaign has been based on the shoe in nearly 20 years, and the company was caught flat-footed as competitors have recently revitalized casual footwear with more vibrant styles and colors.

On Monday, G.H. Bass will announce a new campaign that it says will pay homage to the Weejun and, its partner, another American icon, the penny.

“The brand has lost its way over the past few years,” said Kristin Kohler Burrows, the president of G.H. Bass. “It’s really a rebirth. It’s a great opportunity to take an asset like G.H. Bass has and dust it off and polish it off in a modern way.”

Before taking over at Bass about a year ago, Ms. Burrows was president of the Keds Group, part of Collective Brands, where she led a campaign that tried to reposition Keds sneakers for a millennial consumer. Elements of the G.H. Bass campaign include an updated e-commerce Web site that was unveiled on Friday and a Facebook application where consumers can upload their profile photos on a penny with the slogan, “In G.H. Bass We Trust.”

The campaign, which will include digital banner ads on sites like Refinery29 and in-store marketing materials, is geared toward consumers 24 to 45 years old. Bass will also post messages to Twitter using the hashtag #powertothepenny. A video features behind-the-scenes footage of the campaign photo shoot and the song “Penny” by Hanni El Khatib.

Bass executives declined to say what the campaign cost. .

The penny theme will also be used to raise money for the I Have a Dream Foundation, an organization that provides scholarships and other resources for underprivileged children to attend college. For every pair of Weejuns bought, Bass will donate 100 pennies to the organization.

The campaign is beginning when the loafer and casual footwear market is hot, particularly among young urban professionals. In the last few years brands including Cole Haan and Sperry Top-Sider have begun to offer much more stylized and colorful versions of classic shoes like wingtips, oxfords and boat shoes.

“As loafers have trended, there are more brown-shoe brands and higher-end designer brands doing loafer products,” Ms. Burrows said. “To us there’s a huge opportunity to really spin this product into a more fun fashionable color story.”

To that end, the Weejun is getting an updated look with new designs featuring patent leather, studs, camouflage and colors like silver, gold, blue, red, green, pink and yellow. The prices are $98 to $138.

“People are looking for a product that can be dressed up and dressed down,” Ms. Burrows said, noting that the shoe could be worn with jeans, khakis or dress pants. For women, men’s wear styles for the fall also offer an opportunity to reposition the brand, she said.

Stephen Niedzwiecki, the chief creative officer and co-founder of Yard, the agency that worked on the campaign’s visual aesthetic, including photographs of models wearing updated Weejuns beside images of pennies with the tagline “Power to the Penny,” said the approach was meant to celebrate the penny and the penny loafer as American icons. G.H. Bass is “a brand that doesn’t need to make up the heritage,” Mr. Niedzwiecki said. “It’s truly authentic.”

“It was time to regain ownership,” he said.

But regaining ownership was not the problem G.H. Bass had to solve, said Robert Passikoff, the president of Brand Keys in New York, a brand and customer-loyalty consulting company. “Everybody knows their name,” Mr. Passikoff said. “The question is, What do people think about the brands?”

The brand remained untouched for many years, he said, and the company did not tap into the sexiness that other shoemakers had.

“It’s one of those things to be Bass and be the creator of the penny loafer and have the heritage that they have in terms of the penny loafer being the definition of cool,” Mr. Passikoff said. “But it does you no good if that doesn’t matter to people anymore.”

“If you’re a millennial, you’re certainly looking for somewhat of a fashion statement about yourself,” he said.

Bass’s revitalization of the penny loafer could be well timed, Mr. Passikoff said. That other brands are updating traditional shoes is “a dead-on acknowledgment that fashion trumps heritage.”

Advertising: Advance Ad Sales for New TV Season Called Lukewarm

After months of buildup and weeks of negotiations, the five English-language broadcasters finished their sales last week in what is known as the upfront market, so named because it takes place before each season begins. The results were not as bad as some had expected, but not as robust as others had hoped.

That reflects how trends in television advertising have been, for a while now, “O.K. but not great,” Doug Creutz, a media analyst for Cowen & Company, said in a report late last month.

Pricing in the upfront market, he added, “was generally in line with expectations — perhaps just a touch light,” with increases in a closely watched metric known as cpm, for the cost to reach each 1,000 viewers, in the mid to high-mid single-digit range.

“A touch light” is not a phrase normally associated with upfront seasons, but the broadcasters “suffered their worst annual decline in viewership” during the 2012-13 season since the 2007-8 season, which was affected by the writers’ strike, Mr. Creutz said. There was no true breakout hit among new series, along with a worrisome slump in ratings for the sophomore seasons of popular new shows from the 2011-12 season.

Although it is notoriously difficult to come up with exact figures for the results of each upfront market, estimates are that the five broadcast networks received commitments from marketers to buy about $9 billion worth of commercial time during the 2013-14 season, which begins next month and continues through May. That is roughly on par with or a shade lower than what they took in last summer, in the 2012-13 upfront market. The results are not that bad considering the outcome of the 2012-13 season or the myriad problems of legacy media, as shown by the sales, in rapid succession, of Newsweek, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

Television “is not going away for now,” Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at the Pivotal Research Group, said in a phone interview, because it is “still the least bad way to get your reach and frequency,” referring to two important goals of marketers when communicating with consumers.

As valuable as digital media may be, “you can’t do without” television “if you’re a large brand,” he added, because “you can’t accomplish your media goals” without it.

There was a major difference between this year’s upfront negotiations and last year’s: the dickering ended about six weeks later this time around, primarily because of delays in marketers coming to terms with two of the five networks, ABC and NBC. Those talks concluded last week, whereas CBS and CW wrapped up in early June and Fox Broadcasting the previous week.

The later conclusion of the 2013-14 upfront market might have benefited the broadcasters, Mr. Wieser said, because some marketers may have decided to “bring forward” money they planned to spend during the season in what is called the scatter market. With the start of the season now only a month away, he noted, the line between the upfront and scatter markets could have blurred. (Making commitments during an upfront market is a bet that prices will be higher during the season; deciding to hold back money for the scatter market is a bet that prices will be lower during the season.)

CBS, the biggest broadcast network, led in the total dollar amount of commitments, at $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion; by some estimates, CBS’s take may have been as much as $2.75 billion. The cpm rates that CBS is charging advertisers for the 2013-14 season are estimated to be increasing by an average of 7.5 percent.

According to Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, CBS fared the best in the upfront marketplace.

“Once again, we took share from our competitors and we were the leader in both volume and pricing,” he told analysts last week.

In something of a backhanded compliment, Mr. Moonves said of the other broadcasters, “I even noticed our competitors got substantial price increases as well, which actually surprised me, how well they did.”

The rest of the estimates for dollar volume are: ABC, part of the Walt Disney Company, $2.1 billion to $2.2 billion; NBC, part of the NBCUniversal division of Comcast, $1.9 billion to $2 billion; Fox Broadcasting, part of 21st Century Fox, around $1.8 billion; and CW, a joint venture of the CBS Corporation and Time Warner, $400 million to $420 million.

For the second consecutive year, cable channels have fared or are faring better in the upfront market than their broadcast competitors. Estimates are that the combined take for the scores of cable channels that sell commercial time will total as much as $9.8 billion. Many channels are enjoying more robust demand than the broadcasters; for instance, AMC, part of AMC Networks, has said its ad sales are nearly 20 percent higher than in the upfront market last year.

Advertising: Songs and Sunscreen Spread the Health Insurance Message

THE part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act that requires Americans to obtain health insurance has been a contentious issue politically, but new advertising from the 17 states setting up marketplaces where residents will buy insurance tends to be buoyant.

New commercials for the Oregon exchange, called Cover Oregon, for example, resemble something from a tourism bureau. In one commercial, the singer Matt Sheehy performs an anthemic song, “Long Live Oregonians,” that is reminiscent of “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie.

“From Hart Mountain, to the Skidmore Fountain, from the shores of Gold Beach, to the gorge out east,” sings Mr. Sheehy, who wears a plaid flannel shirt and appears strumming his guitar in each new location as he refers to it. “We’re free to be healthy, gonna breathe that fresh air, wanna get the best care, that a state can get.”

Neither this commercial, nor others featuring the singer Laura Gibson or the hip-hop group Lifesavas, mention insurance, although they do conclude with the exchange’s Web address.

A recent survey of uninsured Oregonians commissioned by Cover Oregon found that 87 percent of respondents were unfamiliar with the exchange, while 9 percent had a favorable opinion of it and 3 percent an unfavorable opinion. The first phase of the campaign, which was introduced on July 9, aims to familiarize Oregonians with the name of the organization. Subsequent ads will promote enrollment in the program, which, like other states’, begins Oct. 1 for coverage that takes effect Jan. 1.

“If all we were doing is what we’re doing right now, I’d be nervous,” said Amy Fauver, chief communications officer of Cover Oregon, referring to the first phase of the campaign. “But we needed to get our name out there, and get positive associations with our name, and in the fall we’re shifting to a more direct call to action.”

The campaign, by North, a Portland branding and advertising agency, also features other Oregon musicians in Web-only music videos, television and radio commercials. Work by Oregon visual artists is featured in print ads and on billboards. A promotional budget of almost $10 million includes placing advertising, the agency fee and the public relations efforts.

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey in April found that 59 percent of Americans with household incomes under $30,000, a group more apt to be uninsured, were unaware that the Affordable Care Act and its insurance requirement were the law of the land.

The first state to introduce an ad campaign was Colorado, which in May began running television commercials for Connect for Health Colorado. As with other states, the Colorado online marketplace resembles travel sites like Expedia, with competing insurance companies and a choice of coverage levels, and the commercials open with residents navigating the site.

After actors in the spots choose a plan, the walls of their homes slide away to reveal other settings, and they end up either celebrating a win in a casino, being sprayed with Champagne in a locker room or astride a horse in a winner’s circle. The ads close with a voice-over, “When health insurance companies compete, there’s only one winner: you.”

The campaign, which includes print, radio and billboard ads, is by Pilgrim, an advertising and digital marketing agency in Denver. Connect for Health Colorado is projected to spend more than $21 million on marketing and advertising, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

Decidedly more somber is a campaign that began July 15 for Nevada’s marketplace, with a documentary-style approach that focuses on the perils of not having coverage.

“I live fast and play hard,” says the text for one print ad, with a portrait of a man in his early 20s. “But I don’t have health insurance and that scares me.”

C. J. Bawden, communications officer for the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange, said that focus groups of Nevadans indicated a preference for a serious tone.

The focus groups “said health care is a serious matter so please don’t trivialize it and make funny ads about it because we want the facts,” Mr. Bawden said.

The campaign, by KPS3, a marketing and advertising agency in Reno, Nev., includes spots on TV, radio, billboards, newspapers and social media, with projected advertising placement expenditures at about $2.8 million.

In August, beachgoers in Connecticut will be handed packets of sunscreen printed with “Get Covered” and the logo and Web site for Access Health CT, the state’s health insurance exchange. Roving representatives of the exchange clad in orange T-shirts also will hand out branded containers of hand sanitizer and packets of adhesive bandages.

The tchotchkes are part of an extensive $6 million promotional and advertising campaign, which includes television commercials and print, online and radio advertising. The campaign is by Pappas MacDonnell, a marketing and advertising agency in Southport, Conn.

Advertising for health exchanges in Utah and Rhode Island will be introduced between mid-August and early September, according to representatives from the programs.

The Covered California exchange is projected to spend $86 million on advertising placements through April 2015, and it has hired Weber Shandwick, a unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, to develop and produce advertising, and Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide to help promote it. A representative of the exchange said advertising would be introduced before open enrollment begins on Oct. 1, declining to be more specific. The health exchange for New York, which has yet to announce what it will be called, has a $40.2 million advertising and marketing budget for the next two years and has hired the New York office of DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group. The agency will develop a campaign with television, print, online and transit advertising.

The campaign will begin in mid- to late-September, according to Bill Schwarz, director of public affairs for the New York State Department of Health.

Advertising: Air Force Asks Students to Solve Real-World Problems

THE Air Force, as part of its recruitment efforts, is approaching young people for help in solving real-world technological problems using a collaborative online platform.

The initiative, which will be introduced on Thursday, will create a digital program called the Air Force Collaboratory, in which young people will be challenged to develop technologies for search-and-rescue operations in collapsed structures; to create software code for a quadrotor, a type of unmanned, aerial vehicle; and to determine where to place the newest GPS satellite.

The Air Force hopes the program will attract students in so-called STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — to work with its airmen on developing solutions for the three challenges, and, ideally, consider enlisting.

The initiative — which the Air Force will promote through digital advertising, social media and partnerships with groups like Discovery Education — is the latest recruiting effort created for the Air Force by GSD&M, an agency based in Austin, Tex., that is part of the Omnicom Group.

GSD&M has been the Air Force’s agency since 2001, developing campaigns to help it attract the over 28,000 recruits it needs annually; the agency said its work had helped the Air Force meet its recruiting goals each year.

GSD&M’s recruiting strategy for the Air Force — which has always sought tech-savvy candidates — previously featured an “Airman Challenge” online video game. A separate campaign included television spots whose theme was, “It’s not science fiction.”

Col. Marcus Johnson, chief of the strategic marketing division of the Air Force Recruiting Service, said the Air Force focused on “going after the best and brightest young men and women, with an emphasis on the STEM subjects. Whether they’re in high school or college, those topics translate into what we do in the Air Force.”

He said the collaboratory program was meant to appeal to men and women ages 16 to 24, including high school students still determining their future plans.

Ryan Carroll, a creative director at GSD&M, said the Air Force was “very much like the Apples and Googles of the world in recognizing the huge need for scientists and engineers. They reach out to kids at an early age and show them the amazing things they can do with science and technology.” He pointed to initiatives like the Google Science Fair, an online, annual, global science competition for teenagers, as an example.

Similarly, the collaboratory program aims to “inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, technologists and mathematicians, and to show them all the amazing, science-related things the Air Force does,” Mr. Carroll said. The program will also allow students to “participate and solve real problems the Air Force solves every day,” he added.

Young people will be able to learn more about the initiative’s challenges at the Web site airforce.com/collaboratory, which will act as a forum. Challenge participants will be able to use custom-built tools to share ideas and work with airmen and other experts to develop solutions.

Not surprisingly, digital media will primarily be used to promote the program. Custom editorial content is being developed for the STEM hub of Good.com, a global community of “pragmatic idealists,” while custom videos are being filmed for DNews, an online video series from Discovery Communications; the videos will feature the DNews hosts Trace Dominguez and Anthony Carboni. The technology network Technorati is asking bloggers to create custom posts on the collaboratory and related subjects, while the Air Force will pay to place videos on Web sites like YouTube, Blip and Machinima. In addition, the Air Force will promote the initiative on Facebook and Twitter.

Digital banner advertising will run on the Web sites of Scientific American, Popular Science and The Verge. One set of ads depicts an Air Force helicopter approaching a scene of destruction after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that has trapped dozens of survivors. The copy reads, “Your idea could save them. The Air Force Collaboratory. Search and rescue 2.0 is now open. Start collaborating.”

The Air Force also is working with Discovery Education, a division of Discovery Communications, on an outreach program for high school science and math teachers.

Colonel Johnson said that although the collaboratory would run through November, new challenges could be created after that. In addition, he said the Web site would carry no overt recruiting messages, nor would the Air Force actively recruit challenge participants, since the initiative was meant to raise interest in the Air Force and possibly encourage participants to seek out more information about opportunities there.

The budget for the campaign is $3.7 million.

Diane H. Mazur, a former Air Force officer, professor emeritus of law at the University of Florida and author of “A More Perfect Military: How the Constitution Can Make Our Military Stronger,” said that although the collaboratory concept was “good, it’s not sophisticated to the degree it needs to be to attract the people they think they want to get.” She added, “This is a good direction if you do it well.”

David R. Segal, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who specializes in military sociology, said that while recruiting high school students to “work in military laboratories on military problems” was not new, “what seems new is having interns work online with Air Force scientists.”

“I think they will certainly recruit a good number of high school students interested in science, engineering, technology and math to work on the problems identified. That part is easy,” he said. “Recruiting the same people then to come into the Air Force as enlisted men and women might be more difficult. They are likely to want to go to college.”

As a result, he said, the collaboratory would probably be more successful recruiting Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps students than airmen.

Advertising: Executive From the Agency Grey New York Takes On a Larger Role

The executive is Michael Houston, who since last year has been chief operating officer of Grey New York, part of the Grey North America division of Grey. (Grey, in turn, is a unit of the Grey Group, which is owned by WPP.) Mr. Houston, who turned 41 on Wednesday, is being promoted to chief executive of Grey North America while continuing to share the leadership duties at Grey New York with Tor Myhren, who is president and chief creative officer there.

Mr. Houston’s promotion makes him one of four regional chief executives at Grey, all reporting to James R. Heekin, chairman and chief executive of the Grey Group. Mr. Heekin most recently handled the Grey North America duties with his other responsibilities.

Mr. Houston, in assuming his new post, becomes one of the few African-Americans in the executive suites of the large, mainstream Madison Avenue agencies — even, perhaps, the most senior. No black person has been chief executive of such an agency since 2006, when Ann Fudge, chairwoman and chief executive at the Young & Rubicam Brands division of WPP, retired. “By no means do I define myself only by that,” Mr. Houston said in a telephone interview. Still, “I do think it’s unfortunate that my appointment potentially makes me the highest-ranking African-American,” he added. “It sends a signal there aren’t a lot of African-American people in the industry in the highest ranks.”

That is problematic, Mr. Houston said, because “we’re meant to appeal to, tap into, popular culture” on behalf of marketer clients, “and it’s hard to do that without diversity.”

“I do applaud the industry for trying to diversify,” he added, but “in our industry ‘diversity’ ought to mean diversity of thought, diversity of background, different ages, different approaches, different sexual orientations. We need to ensure we’re taking the broadest definition of diversity, really being able to appreciate, respect and value others’ points of view.”

Mr. Houston joined Grey New York in 2007 as executive vice president and director for marketing after working at agencies that included Chiat/Day, Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners and Y&R as well as at firms like And Partners, Elias Arts and Landor Associates. He was named global chief marketing officer of Grey in 2010 and managing director of Grey New York in 2011.

“I think a lot of Michael,” said Catherine Bension, chief executive at SelectResources International in Santa Monica, Calif., which helps marketers with agency searches.

“He’s a terrific person,” she added, “and one of the young new leaders of our industry.” (Last year, Mr. Houston was named one of the “40 Under 40” by Crain’s New York Business.)

“Michael has been at Grey New York since the start of its transformation or metamorphosis into a more future-facing, more contemporary agency,” Ms. Bension said, referring to Grey New York’s winning a skein of new accounts with billings estimated at more than $3 billion, among them DirecTV, E*Trade Financial, Gillette, Marriott Hotels and Resorts, RadioShack and Sargento Foods (although one, E*Trade, recently departed.) She praised Mr. Houston for being “a great partner to the creatives” at the agency.

Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, the world’s largest agency holding group in billings, also had nice words about Mr. Houston.

“I’m delighted for Michael,” Mr. Sorrell wrote in an e-mail, describing him as “a key member of the Grey management team.”

Mr. Houston has “done an outstanding job,” Mr. Sorrell said, “and thoroughly deserves this recognition for his success, which is based on an exceptional track record.”

Mr. Heekin, in a phone interview, said he would be turning to Mr. Houston for three primary tasks: prospecting for new business, expanding services like digital and working on “a smart, strategic approach to expanding our footprint in the U.S.”

Grey North America has, in addition to Grey New York, offices in San Francisco, Toronto and Vancouver. It has no presence in other prominent American markets after closing offices in Atlanta, Los Angeles and other cities.

Among the markets Mr. Heekin listed as having potential were the Southwest and the Midwest, “whether it’s Chicago or Kansas City,” because “our footprint in the middle of the country is nonexistent.”

He said he would consider both starting offices and making acquisitions, and added that the latter was more likely, as he and Mr. Houston had already been talking to agencies that Grey might buy. In the meantime, Mr. Houston and Mr. Heekin are making changes in San Francisco, hiring Milan Martin as president of Grey San Francisco, succeeding Brad Fogel, who is leaving to pursue other interests, a spokesman said. Mr. Martin, 39, most recently was managing director and chief strategist at Anthem Worldwide in San Francisco, part of Schawk Inc.

“We’re getting things moving in San Francisco,” Mr. Houston said. “We’re excited about what we could do with the office if we can build on the history there and bring in some of the fervor we have in New York.” Clients of Grey San Francisco include Purolator, Reliant Energy and Symantec.

Mr. Houston’s new post includes other duties, among them overseeing Grey Activation and Public Relations. He will share the oversight of Wing, a multicultural agency with offices in New York and Miami, with Alain Groenendaal, who is president and chief executive of Wing and Grey Latin America.

Advertising: On Independence Day, a Salute to the Brave

ACCORDING to the calendar, the Fourth of July is nigh. But consumers may be excused for believing that it is November and Veterans Day is approaching.

The potential confusion stems from a change in the kinds of advertisements that Madison Avenue has been bringing out as Independence Day approaches. The typical celebratory pitches — usually humorous or even silly, with, for instance, founding fathers promoting automotive clearance sales — are being joined by ads that take a more serious tack to honor the veterans of the nation’s wars, particularly those who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many such ads also announce donations by marketers to organizations that help those veterans, encourage consumers to make donations, or both.

For example, OgilvyOne Worldwide in New York, part of the Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide division of WPP, is introducing this week a pro bono campaign to raise money for Building for America’s Bravest, which builds smart homes — technologically advanced and handicapped-accessible — for members of the armed forces who have been gravely injured. The campaign includes commercials, directed at no charge by the commercial director Joe Pytka, featuring wounded veterans who are among hundreds on a waiting list for the houses, which cost about $400,000 to $500,000 each.

“We felt there needed to be communications in the marketplace to build awareness” for the program, said Brian Fetherstonhaugh, chairman and chief executive of OgilvyOne. Starting the outreach around the Fourth of July recognizes that “it’s an emotional touch point” for the public, he added.

There is also a goal to connect Independence Day with the desire for self-sufficiency among the veterans, Mr. Fetherstonhaugh said. That is voiced by a veteran in one commercial, who declares, “For me to gain independence again would be amazing.”

Executives at Building for America’s Bravest, which is administered by the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, say they have so far given houses to six veterans, and by the end of the year hope to have the number of houses delivered or broken ground on reach 23.

“This is exactly the time to start” the campaign, said Frank Siller, chairman of the foundation. “We’re going to enjoy the Fourth of July, but there are some others we can’t forget.”

Among them is Todd Nicely, a Marine corporal who was severely wounded in Afghanistan in 2010 and lost all his limbs. He and his wife, Crystal, received a house, in Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., in June 2012.

“Every time I step into that home, I get a sense of freedom,” Mr. Nicely said. “I want other guys to have that same feeling.”

Having a smart home “took a huge weight off your shoulders” so “you can focus on other things, like therapy,” he added. “It took me 10 times longer to take a shower than it does now.”

Mr. Nicely described advertising as “one of the greatest tools we have” to provide the public with information about Building for America’s Bravest.

“It’s mind-boggling the amount of veterans coming home who need assistance like this,” he said. “America doesn’t owe me anything, but the fact I got something is heartwarming; it’s a huge thank-you that’s really appreciated.”

In another example of Independence Day salutes to veterans, Oral-B, sold by Procter & Gamble, is sponsoring a campaign this week that includes a $100,000 donation to an organization, Hope for the Warriors, that helps members of the armed forces who have served after Sept. 11, 2001.

The campaign, which promotes Oral-B products that are “Built in the USA,” was the brainchild of employees of the Oral-B manual-toothbrush plant in Iowa City, Iowa, many of them veterans, said Rishi Dhingra, North American oral care marketing director at Procter in Cincinnati.

The campaign, which first appeared on Memorial Day, will return for Labor Day and Veterans Day, Mr. Dhingra said. There are also video clips featuring employees of the plant, which will appear on Web sites like the MSN and Yahoo video networks, foxsports.com, nascar.com and YouTube. Print ads will feature a Nascar driver, Ryan Newman, who is sponsored by Oral-B.

These are other examples of marketers running campaigns in the spring and summer, rather than in the fall and around Veterans Day:

¦ Major League Baseball and People magazine, published by the Time Inc. division of Time Warner, are asking the public to “honor a military hero” by selecting 30 veterans to represent each of the 30 M.L.B. teams at the 2013 All-Star Game on July 16 at Citi Field.

The Web site for the promotion includes a link to the Web site of an organization called Welcome Back Veterans, which helps returning veterans and their families and is an initiative of Major League Baseball Charities and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

¦ From mid-May through early June, the Macy’s division of Macy’s Inc. raised $3.4 million for a veterans’ organization, Got Your 6, through a cause marketing effort that was part of the retailer’s ongoing American Icons campaign.

¦ The Dove Men + Care line of products, sold by Unilever, promoted donations to Operation Homefront, which assists veterans, members of the military and military families, with a campaign carrying the theme “Mission: Care.”

¦ Brawny paper towels is running a campaign that pledges a donation of up to $350,000 to support the Wounded Warriors Project. Brawny is sold by the Georgia-Pacific Consumer Products division of Koch Industries, owned by the Koch brothers; according to Forbes magazine, they were, as of March, worth $34 billion.

Voter ID Case Back On - State Must Correct Its Advertising

Petitioners who challenged Pennsylvania?s new voter ID law are back in court after winning an injunction earlier this month because, they argue, the state is confusing voters by neglecting to correct its ad campaign about the photo identification requirements that will not be enforced for the coming election.

Advertising: When a Founder Is the Face of a Brand

That’s the dilemma Men’s Wearhouse is left with after dumping its founder and spokesman, George Zimmer, a decision announced Wednesday. Mr. Zimmer had starred in the suit retailer’s commercials for almost 30 years, guaranteeing men that “you’re going to like the way you look.”

On Thursday, a day after the company’s terse announcement, reaction on social media continued to be fast and furious, indicating that Mr. Zimmer had made the jump from business executive to cultural icon. “George Zimmer” was one of the top searches on Google on Wednesday, and news of the firing made the gossip sites TMZ and Gawker.

And the Men’s Wearhouse Facebook page had more than 200 comments criticizing the company for ousting Mr. Zimmer, with sentiments like “If George Zimmer isn’t coming back, neither am I!” and riffs on Mr. Zimmer’s signature ad closer like “You’re going to miss the way I shopped. I guarantee it.”

Men’s Wearhouse has not said whether it will continue running the television commercials featuring Mr. Zimmer; the company had recently been evaluating their effectiveness, Richard Jaffe, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, said.

Companies do face risks when they tie an executive’s personality to their businesses, advertising executives said. But it is a popular approach, with executives like Dave Thomas at Wendy’s, Frank Perdue at Perdue Farms and Martha Stewart becoming the face and voice of their companies.

The appeal of doing so is obvious, said Ellis Verdi, co-founder of the ad agency DeVito/Verdi, which has made ads for retailers like Kohl’s and Coldwater Creek. It’s relatively cheap, rather than hiring, say, celebrities like LeBron James or Taylor Swift, and it allows for flexibility — an executive can credibly promote a Presidents’ Day sale or talk about the brand’s origins.

Mr. Perdue, the former chief of Perdue Farms, was one of the first corporate executives to appear in ads for his company. His “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” commercials are considered legends.

“It was the first time someone branded a commodity,” said Adam Hanft, a brand strategist. “Without that, there would be no Perdue as we know it today.”

That type of marketing can be highly successful until the executive ages, leaves, dies or gets into trouble.

When Mr. Perdue handed the company to his son, Jim, Perdue’s ad agency ran spots featuring both men before using Jim as the lone spokesman.

Other transitions have not been as smooth.

When Orville Redenbacher turned 88, he was bounced from his popcorn ads as the company tried to appeal to a younger, microwave-popcorn-eating demographic.

When the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Col. Harland Sanders, died, the company could not decide how to react. It tried ads with an actor impersonating the colonel, and a cartoon version of him, leaving consumers confused.

And after the Wendy’s founder and ad star, Mr. Thomas, died in 2002 after appearing in more than 800 commercials, Wendy’s immediately edited ads to remove him. But the company underestimated his bond with consumers, executives later said. Within five months, Wendy’s released new ads promising diners its food was still done “Dave’s way,” and sent posters featuring Mr. Thomas to its locations nationwide. Almost a decade after he died, Wendy’s started featuring the original Wendy — Mr. Thomas’s daughter Melinda Lou Morse, nicknamed Wendy, and by then 50 — in its ads.

A different situation confronted Macy’s when Martha Stewart was released from prison in 2005 as the department store chain considered considering carrying her housewares line. It conducted extensive research to gauge how consumers felt about Ms. Stewart post-prison, learning that her image had been tarnished but not her brand.

“Lots of people don’t like her, but they like her products and will happily buy them from Macy’s,” the company’s chief executive, Terry Lundgren, wrote in a 2006 e-mail, summing up research a public relations firm did for Macy’s. It began selling Martha Stewart goods in 2007.

Advertising executives say Men’s Wearhouse is in a particular bind because the ads featuring Mr. Zimmer have been remarkably effective.

“You have to ask yourself how many campaigns in this country last for 25 years,” Mr. Verdi said. “It’s part of our culture — you have comedians riffing on it, you have the tagline that people talk about all the time. So you have what on judgment what would probably be one of the most successful campaigns, in my opinion, in retailing history.”

Men’s Wearhouse spends less than competitors on ads — just $92.2 million in 2012, according to a regulatory filing, or 3.8 percent of sales. Macy’s spends 4.3 percent of its sales on advertising.

“He’s very closely associated with Men’s Wearhouse and the brand, and as a result I think there’s some downside to a company eliminating his persona too quickly,” Mr. Verdi said. (One customer on Facebook likened his removal to what would happen if a certain fast food chain dumped Ronald McDonald.)

Initially, the ads featuring Mr. Zimmer in the mid-’80s were an attempt to make Men’s Wearhouse less tacky.

The company had been using “this short, baldheaded guy who would jump out from behind a rack of suits and do his spiel,” said Richie Goldman, an early partner, in an interview now on YouTube, adding, “We wondered why we had an image problem.”

“Finally one day George said, you know what? If we’re going to get ourselves out of this, we have to change our tone. Let me go on the air, and if people are not going to believe the president and C.E.O. of the company, who are they going to believe?” Mr. Goldman said.

He had planned to finish his first ad with “That’s the fact, Jack,” from the movie “Stripes,” but at the last minute, swapped it out with the more long-lived “I guarantee it.”

The company did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday, but in a recent regulatory filing, noted that “George Zimmer has been very important to the success of the company and is the primary advertising spokesman.”

“The extended loss of the services of Mr. Zimmer or other key personnel could have a material adverse effect on the securities markets’ view of our prospects and materially harm our business,” the company said.

The company has fiddled with the ads over the years. Sometimes Mr. Zimmer appeared on the selling floor or reclining on a patio. In other ads, he gave advice to employees and at one point, standing at a “Suits University” lectern, told men to don mock turtlenecks. (It was the ’90s.)

In 2010, the company experimented with a different tagline for Mr. Zimmer: “There’s a place men belong. That place is Men’s Wearhouse. I guarantee it.” But that didn’t stick, and the company quickly reverted to the original.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 22, 2013

An article on Friday about the risks faced by brands that tie an executive’s personality to their businesses erroneously included one company among those that spend more on advertising than Men’s Wearhouse, whose founder and promotional face, George Zimmer, was recently fired. Though Macy’s spends more, it is not known if Jos. A. Bank’s advertising costs exceed those of Men’s Wearhouse. (The 39 percent of revenue figure given for Jos. A. Bank represents the amount it spends on marketing and sales, a category that includes store payroll and other expenses; the company does not break out its advertising expenses.)

Advertising: Longing to Stay Wanted, MTV Turns Its Attention to Younger Viewers

TRYING to win over a fickle teenager isn’t easy. Trying to win over millions of them every night is — as the kids say — cray cray.

But that’s exactly what MTV has had to do since its inception in the 1980s as the cable channel for disenchanted youth.

“Unlike other brands that get a lock on the audience and age with them, we have to shed our skin and reinvent ourselves,” said Stephen K. Friedman, president of MTV.

The channel is in the process of shedding its skin again, this time to appeal to viewers age 14 to 17 who have different preferences than the 18- to 25-year-olds who make up the older portion of the millennial generation (a cohort born roughly between 1981 and 2000 and also known as Generation Y or the Facebook Generation).

On Tuesday, MTV will introduce its latest deep dive into generational behavior: a nationwide study of 1,800 “young millennials.” The findings will be presented to marketers and MTV programmers to help show how the channel and its sponsors can speak to the younger end of the audience.

These younger viewers grew up looking up to Katniss Everdeen, the gritty heroine from “The Hunger Games,” rather than Harry Potter, the study says. Older millennials were told by their baby boomer parents that “they were special and gifted, with a magic wand capable of changing the world” and “the world is your oyster.” The Generation X parents who are raising this younger crop of millennials tell them “you have to create your own oyster,” the MTV study says.

Generational studies have been pivotal to MTV’s past success. Faced with double-digit declines in ratings in 2008, the channel embarked on an immense research project to try to understand the country’s roughly 80 million millennials and, in turn, to get them to want their MTV.

That study helped inform hits like “Jersey Shore” and “Teen Mom” and by 2010, ratings among MTV’s core audience of 12- to 34-year-olds had increased by 24 percent to 895,000 viewers, according to Nielsen.

“Candidly, we were hanging onto Gen Xers a little too long,” said Mr. Friedman, who called the 2008 research “a wake-up call.”

Last year, the average number of prime-time viewers age 12 to 34 fell 23 percent, to 834,000, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to Nielsen. (Jason Rzepka, senior vice president for brand communications and public affairs at MTV, pointed out that online streaming had affected nightly ratings, but that the channel remained the most watched basic cable channel among viewers 12 to 24.)

The new study, called “Young Millennials Will Keep Calm & Carry On,” comes at a turning point for MTV. “Jersey Shore,” the channel’s highest rated series ever, ended in December after six seasons. Around the same time, the channel began to notice shifts in behavior and tastes among younger viewers.

“Catfish: The TV Show,” a documentary series about online dating that had its premiere last year, emerged as a surprise hit with an average of 3.2 million viewers an episode and was the highest-rated premiere for an 11 p.m. series. MTV has attributed the show’s popularity, in part, to this younger demographic.

Alison Hillhouse, the vice president of MTV Insights who oversaw the study, said 14- to 17-year-olds were even more comfortable with social media and technology than their older siblings. She calls them “digital latchkey kids” because their hands-off Generation X parents have largely left them alone to navigate the Web.

Unlike the “Yes We Can” optimistic older millennials, this younger group of teenagers has a raised awareness of economic problems, MTV says.

“At age 13 they know they won’t find their dream job right away,” Ms. Hillhouse said. More than three-quarters of 14- to 17-year-olds interviewed said, “I worry about the negative impact that today’s economy will have on me or my future.”

Viacom, the parent company of MTV, is known for its in-depth audience research and for matching that research with marketers’ needs. MTV will take its latest findings to advertisers like Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Pepsi to help inform them about what type of ads will work on this more pragmatic group of teenagers.

“There’s always the research people at the table that helps us really ground the ideas in insight,” said Claudia Cahill, chief content officer at OMD, part of the Omnicom Media Group unit of the Omnicom Group. Ms. Cahill serves as the intermediary between MTV and brands like Pepsi, Hewlett-Packard and State Farm.

Research played a role in Pepsi’s “Live for Now” campaign on MTV and its sister channel, VH1, Ms. Cahill said.

“Marketers who aren’t of this generation have to use tactics to get these teenagers involved,” she said.

The trick for MTV will be to not rely too heavily on cultural anthropology. Skeptics of MTV’s approach say a research-based algorithm could never lead to the alchemy of Madonna in a conical bra, the couch-side cackles of “Beavis and Butt-head” or the first season of “The Real World,” when viewers got a first glimpse at “what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.”

MTV will be taking its findings to writers and producers, but Mr. Friedman says he wants the findings to inform creators, rather than dictate what they create. Research, he says, is not brought into the development process until the channel tests pilots with focus groups.

“It’s a marriage of science and art, and you don’t want to underestimate the importance of the art,” Mr. Rzepka of MTV said.

Advertising: Courting Thrifty Consumers With Value and Quality Brands Stress Value and Quality to Reach Thrifty Consumers

Many on Madison Avenue are deciding to focus on value, as in value for money, celebrating thriftiness as they did during the dark days of 2008 and 2009 but also, in an effort to keep ads from growing stale, suggesting that product attributes like quality matter, too, in a “you get what you pay for” fashion.

For example, advertising to be introduced on Monday by Vonage, the Internet phone provider, replaces its usual message of lower prices, expressed by exhortations like “Ditch the big bill,” with a theme, “Crazy generous,” voiced by a brand character styled as the company’s new chief generosity officer. “What we need is a company that connects us with generosity,” the character says in a commercial by JWT, part of WPP.

The new theme is “bigger than just saving money,” said Barbara Goodstein, chief marketing officer at Vonage Holdings in Holmdel, N.J.

“We believe people should have the opportunity to find value in technology,” she added, listing elements that, in addition to low cost, include “flexibility, simplicity, quality, new products and innovation.”

The “Crazy generous” theme is meant to convey that Vonage remains “committed to providing consumers with low-cost communications services,” Ms. Goodstein said, as part of “a business philosophy” embodied by the brand character.

“He is a champion of the people,” she added, in a populist way, which makes him “the right spokesperson for our times.”

Procter & Gamble, the nation’s largest advertiser by spending, has been scrambling to fine-tune its lineup of mostly premium-price household staples in categories like beauty, detergents and paper goods. The goal is to add lower-price items to appeal to shoppers who have been switching brands to save money but still seek efficacy from what they buy, while not eroding sales for the company’s higher-price merchandise.

The recent abrupt departure of the Procter & Gamble chief executive, Robert A. McDonald, who was succeeded by his predecessor, A. G. Lafley, was attributed partly to concerns the effort was hitting too many bumpy patches.

One example of how Procter has sought to adapt to the times was the return in January of Vidal Sassoon hair products, discontinued in North America in 2003, as what the company called the “affordable” Vidal Sassoon Pro Series line — i.e., priced lower than the company’s Pantene brand name hair products, but higher than store brands.

This June, Procter & Gamble plans to introduce Iams So Good, a dog food that will cost about 15 percent less than the Iams line, which is among the higher-price dog foods like Eukanuba and Hill’s. Iams So Good, aimed at brands like Beneful and Pedigree, is being introduced with advertising by the creative agency for Iams, Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, part of the Publicis Groupe, that includes commercials, print and online ads, displays in stores and content in social media. The budget for the Iams So Good campaign, which echoes the Iams brand’s ad theme, “Keep love strong,” is estimated at more than $50 million.

Making Iams “more accessible” is “a big move for us,” said Kristine Decker, marketing director for North America at the Procter & Gamble pet care division in Cincinnati.

“We’re broadening our appeal,” she added, because “we realize a lot of our brands need to ‘tier down’ to appeal to more consumers.” She compared adding Iams So Good as part of the Iams line to the way the company added lower-price Bounty Basic and Charmin Basic products to the premium-price Bounty and Charmin lines of paper goods.

As Iams So Good arrives in stores, Procter intends to “support regular Iams, too,” Ms. Decker said, because “we’ve got to build the base as we expand.” According to Kantar Media, a division of WPP, Procter spent $69.9 million to advertise Iams last year in major media, compared with $67.4 million in 2011. That could help deter defections to Iams So Good by buyers of Iams.

The campaign for Iams So Good promotes the absence of ingredients like added sugar, dyes and artificial preservatives and proclaims that the new variety “has 100 percent wholesome ingredients and nothing else.” The product’s lower cost will be conveyed through the store displays and packaging rather than brought up in commercials or print ads.

“We don’t talk about the value or the price,” said Tris Gates-Bonarius, global creative director on the Iams and Eukanuba brands at Saatchi & Saatchi, so “the look and feel of the campaign” can be in “the Iams tone of voice, celebrating authentic, real relationships between pets and owners.” For instance, she added, the commercials for Iams So Good will feature pets, rather than trained animals, that appear with their owners, just as commercials for Iams do. One spot for Iams So Good depicts a dog named Harvey performing what is described as his “ ‘I’m happy you’re home’ dance.”

Ms. Decker echoed Ms. Gates-Bonarius. “Our first priority is to create awareness of what’s in your dog’s bowl,” Ms. Decker said of the campaign’s emphasis on the ingredients in Iams So Good. “We will drive more overt value awareness in stores.”

Advertising: Sophomore Slump Afflicts Once-Promising TV ShowsDarren Michaels/Warner Brothers Television

Even with increased competition from cable television and online entertainment, networks could always count on new hits to be their strongest line of defense. And for decades the best thing about these new shows was that they continued to get stronger in their second season.

But in the television season about to end, some of the most popular new shows from a year ago have not built on their initial success — and in fact have wound up in premature decline.

The excitement that surrounded the introduction, in fall 2011, of comedies like “New Girl” on the Fox network, “Two Broke Girls” on CBS, and “Last Man Standing” on ABC, and the family-friendly drama “Once Upon a Time” on ABC, largely fizzled in season two, as their ratings fell.

That does not include the calamitous plunge for more marginal shows, like NBC’s “Smash,” which lost half its audience this year and was canceled last Friday.

“It’s something new for breakout hit shows to be down in their second year,” said Warren Littlefield, who put a generation of hits, including “Seinfeld” and “Friends,” on NBC when he led its entertainment division in the 1990s. “And yes, it’s alarming.”

Monday is the start of what is known as upfront week in New York, when the networks show off their new programming to advertisers. In the last few days, the networks announced the new shows they have ordered, and their message was unmistakable: We need new hits — a lot of them.

The four major networks will present a total of at least 41 new series next season, surely among the most to be introduced in one season. And they are not finished; other shows are expected to be announced within weeks.

Hit shows that gather momentum in their second seasons can create a cash cow that will produce revenue for years, even decades. Many shows that later emerged as cultural touchstones were helped by a jump in ratings in their second seasons, including “The X-Files,” “C.S.I.” and “The Simpsons.”

Not every new show last season faltered. The CBS drama “Person of Interest” grew, and ABC’s “Scandal” has caught fire this season. But most have skidded, for a variety of reasons.

Executives say one factor in the downturn for second-year shows has been the across-the-board ratings drop afflicting the industry. Every network is down in the category most closely watched by advertisers — viewers ages 18 through 49 — by margins ranging from 3 percent for CBS to 21 percent for Fox.

“Obviously, this has just been a terrible year for network television,” said Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying company. “And it means this pilot season is the most important for the networks that I can remember.”

But there are other reasons. Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, pointed to changes in the content. “Each of those shows had different issues,” she said, referring to the slumping series. “Creative choices were made that impacted how viewers felt about them.”

Mr. Adgate said too much was asked of some of the new hits, such as counting on them to prop up whole nights. “In the case of ‘Two Broke Girls,’ I think CBS asked it to be a linchpin show,” he said. “It’s not a linchpin show yet, like ‘Big Bang Theory.’ ”

This season CBS moved “Two Broke Girls” to Mondays at 9 p.m., the so called tent-pole spot for that night. Even with delayed viewing counted, it is down almost a million viewers among the 18-to-49 group.

Mr. Adgate also cited the sweeping, often disruptive, issues network programmers face. “You have the competition from cable,” he said. “And now streaming video. And you have young people turning off their TVs. How can a show grow in that environment?”

Advertising: National Geographic Channel Shifts Its Programming to TV Series

Courteney Monroe, the channel’s chief marketing officer, said its executives had worked since 2011 to switch its programming from being four-fifths documentaries and one-fifth series to four-fifths series and one-fifth documentaries. “It’s very hard to build a big, loyal audience without recurring series,” she said.

Those series include “Wicked Tuna,” about fishermen from Gloucester, Mass., and “Doomsday Preppers,” about Americans preparing for the end of the world, both introduced last year; “Brain Games,” introduced last month; and “Ultimate Survival Alaska,” which is set to premiere on Sunday. The channel, a joint venture begun in 2001 between the National Geographic Society and Fox Cable Networks, also recently began producing factually based dramas, like “Killing Lincoln,” which ran in February.

The final episode of the current season of “Wicked Tuna” will be shown on Sunday, followed by the first episode of “Ultimate Survival Alaska,” which Ms. Monroe said makes the evening “the ideal launch for the new brand campaign.”

The channel’s strategy so far appears to have had mixed results: according to Nielsen, the Sunday night showings of “Wicked Tuna” during Season 1 averaged 805,000 viewers, climbing to 953,000 in Season 2 through May 5. Average viewership of Tuesday night showings of “Doomsday Preppers,” however, fell from 936,000 in Season 1 to 736,000 in the second season.

Created by the New York office of BBDO, part of the Omnicom Group, the advertising is the channel’s first new branding campaign since 2009. It includes three spots on three of the new series, each 30 and 45 seconds long. The first, based on “Doomsday Preppers,” depicts a birthday party for a little girl in an underground bunker, who receives a gas mask as a present.

The second spot features Dave Marciano, a fishing boat captain who appears on “Wicked Tuna,” anxiously awaiting a possible catch, while the third spot, promoting “Ultimate Survival Alaska,” follows two adventurers racing to catch an airplane through snowy, icy terrain.

All three ads also feature viewers immersed in the environment of each series, watching the action unfold alongside characters representing the series while dressed in sweat pants and nightclothes, and engaged in activities like brushing their teeth and eating. They are invisible to the characters.

There is also a fourth spot, in 60- and 90-second versions, showing segments of the other three. None of the spots has dialogue; each ends with the tagline, “The places we take you ... aren’t just on the map.”

Greg Hahn, an executive creative director at BBDO New York, said the agency “knew we needed to show some original content and to bring the viewer into it, but we didn’t want to show clips, or people at home watching TV.”

He added, “We wanted to show the emotional response of people to the programming. It’s not just about the geographic places it takes you but also the emotional places. National Geographic magazine and National Geographic Channel have a long history of taking you to exotic places, showing you new locations. We wanted to build off that, open up a new way of looking at the brand.”

The new advertising will first appear on Sunday night on National Geographic Channel in the United States; it will also appear, starting Thursday, on the channel’s Web site and its Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts.

The spots will run in the future on sister channels of National Geographic Channel, Nat Geo WILD, which offers wildlife and natural history programming, and Nat Geo Mundo, a Spanish-language channel. They will also run later on National Geographic channels outside the United States, in 170 countries.

Advertising: Destination XL Caters to Plus-Size Men

But a new commercial from Destination XL, a men’s large-size retailer, takes the unusual approach of featuring chubby men. In the commercial, several men wander in various states of undress in a barren desert, where clothes hang sparingly on a few racks. A bearish naked man, his groin blurred by pixelization, models a pair of gloves triumphantly and says, “Finally, something in my size!”

Another actor wearing a tie but no shirt yells, “Hey, look at Tom, he found an entire outfit.” Tom, however, turns out to be squeezed into an unfortunate ensemble with contrasting plaids.

“Stop shopping in no man’s land,” says a voice-over. “There’s a better way for bigger men to find clothes. Destination XL — big on being better.”

The commercial, by Gotham in New York, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, will be introduced on Monday. It is directed by Tim Bullock with production, appropriately enough, by Hungry Man. Spending on the campaign, which also includes radio and online advertising, is estimated at $12 million.

The campaign was tested in five markets in the fall, but this is the first national campaign for Destination XL, whose parent company, Destination XL Group, also owns Casual Male XL. The company (which recently changed its name from Casual Male Retail Group) opened the first Destination XL in 2010, and is closing Casual Male XL stores as it opens Destination XL stores in the same markets. The last Casual Male XL is projected to close in 2015.

The new commercial is directed at what the company calls “end of the rack” shoppers with waists from 42 to 46 inches, the high (and sometimes scarce) end of the size range for most stores but the low end for retailers like Destination XL. About 65 percent of men large enough to shop at big-and-tall stores fall in that range, but at Casual Male XL stores, they are only 25 percent of customers, according to David Levin, the chief executive of Destination XL Group.

To appeal to bigger male shoppers, aisles at Destination XL stores are wider and dressing rooms bigger. The stores also aim to be more upscale, with hardwood floors, track lighting, free bottled water, on-site tailors, and televisions tuned to sports and financial programming.

Destination XL stores on average are more than 2.3 times larger than Casual Male XL stores, with more than 3.3 times the selection. Along with moderately priced store brands now available at Casual Male XL, Destination XL features more expensive designers like Tommy Hilfiger, Lacoste, Michael Kors and DKNY Jeans.

“We could have called it ‘Casual Male Superstore,’ but guys would say, ‘That’s where my father shopped,’ ” Mr. Levin said of Destination XL. “So we decided to knock them dead with a new name, without any baggage or preconceived notion of what the store was going to be.”

Gotham, the advertising agency, conducted consumer focus groups in several cities, and ethnographic studies in New York, observing big men who agreed to walk representatives through their closets and to visit mainstream retailers where they tried, sometimes futilely, to assemble complete outfits.

Reid Miller, a group creative director at Gotham, said that while women often discuss shopping experiences, “guys sit in silos and their bad shopping experience is a dirty little secret.”

The dystopian setting of the commercial, which ends with men attired in clothes from Destination XL, is meant to “show guys that you’re not alone in this bad experience,” Mr. Miller said. “We wanted to show them that there is this other band of guys, and to come to Destination XL, where you can join your brethren.”

The pixelized shot of an actor’s crotch has met resistance. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox all declined to run the commercial, while five cable networks — including Syfy, USA Network and the NFL Network — chose to show it, the company said.

About a dozen cable networks — including Comedy Central, ESPN and the MLB Network — rejected the pixelized ad, but agreed to run a version where the actor wears briefs. (The four major networks were not offered that alternative when they rejected the pixelized version, but the company plans to try placing it with them in the fall.)

Mr. Levin noted that such blurring is common on shows like “The Office” on NBC.

“I’m watching prime-time television and seeing parts pixelated out every day,” he said. “I don’t understand why we’re being called out on this thing — if this were a hunk of a guy, would there be the same problem?”

Bruce Sturgell, 33, the founder of Chubstr.com, a style blog for larger men, said men his size — at 5-foot-11, he fluctuates from 300 to 350 pounds — tend to settle for limited selection at mainstream stores because they are disappointed with the styles at large-size retailers.

“I go to the big-and-tall stores and I find Hawaiian shirts and Sopranos tracksuits,” Mr. Sturgell said.

He has not yet visited a Destination XL, but was impressed with the new commercial.

“They did a good job of channeling the frustration that a lot of big guys” have while shopping, Mr. Sturgell said.

As for casting, “showing guys that are a little more realistic” is laudable, he said. “I want to see what an article of clothing is going to look like on someone who looks like me.”

Advertising: FleishmanHillard Rebrands Itself, With a 21st Century Focus

Fleishman-Hillard, which was founded in 1946 as Fleishman, Hillard & Associates, will rebrand itself this week as FleishmanHillard, with elements that include a new logo and a new slogan, “The power of true” — no relation, presumably, to “Truth well told,” the slogan of McCann Erickson Worldwide, or “Truth and design,” the slogan of MediaVest.

Truth be told, the changes at FleishmanHillard — with worldwide revenue of more than $500 million and 2,500 employees in 84 offices — are meant to signal how it is striving to become an integrated marketing communications agency that offers services like advertising and social media marketing in addition to public relations.

“ ‘True’ is the central concept we’re rebranding on, to deliver on our promises to be the trusted adviser to guide you through the maze of choices,” said Dave Senay, president and chief executive at FleishmanHillard in St. Louis, which since 1997 has been part of the Diversified Agency Services division of the Omnicom Group, the world’s second-largest agency holding company after WPP.

“It’s not that we’re going to become an ad agency,” Mr. Senay said, adding: “We’re moving into a different space. The vision is to be the most complete communications company in the world. Somebody’s got to be able to put it all together.”

FleishmanHillard will seek to be “channel agnostic,” Mr. Senay said, an industry term meaning to be objective about the various forms of communication, whether paid, owned, earned or shared, to reflect “how the public consumes media today.”

To that end, the agency is hiring a former longtime journalist, Pat Wechsler, as senior vice president and director for editorial and corporate content strategy, working in realms like content marketing, which provides consumers editorial and entertainment articles and video clips that marketers sponsor.

He was hired after FleishmanHillard had brought in scores of the types of employees who are more typically found at consultancies, brand identity businesses or ad agencies, among them analytics specialists, planners, copywriters and art directors.

FleishmanHillard “wasn’t even on my radar,” said Nick Childs, an executive creative director in the agency’s New York office who arrived in 2011 after working at ad agencies like Grey.

“I had a chance to take a risk and do something unique at a big agency that could be a key partner to brands,” he added, “not just pushing out at an audience what a brand wants to say.”

Richard Dale, senior vice president, senior partner and global planning director, who also joined FleishmanHillard in New York in 2011, said that after working for ad agencies like Leo Burnett “I was looking for something different” and became intrigued by the concept of FleishmanHillard’s “transforming into a total communications resource.”

Although “the journey is just beginning at FleishmanHillard, and we still have a lot to do,” he added, “the firm is being given the tools, and it’s proving so game-changing.”

Reflecting the broadening of the services offered by FleishmanHillard beyond public relations, the agency last year placed more than $1.2 billion worth of ads in paid media, compared with $250 million in 2011.

“A lot of things have changed in consumer product marketing, especially the multiplicity of channel options,” said Mike Brooks, executive director at the William K. Busch Brewing Company in St. Louis, which hired FleishmanHillard to create television, radio, outdoor, online, retail and social-media ads to introduce two beers, Kräftig Lager and Kräftig Light.

Asked to assess the work, Mr. Brooks paused to declare, “I’m not on a P.R. campaign for FH,” then said: “I am happy to report thumbs up in every regard. The creative and the messaging are well received. And we have one quarterback of all the disciplines, Tom Hudder, an executive creative director, ensuring everything is consistent.”

FleishmanHillard is, of course, not the only agency reassessing its operations in light of the profound changes in marketing and media. Large competitors like Edelman, part of Daniel J. Edelman Inc., and Weber Shandwick, a unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, are also reworking their service offerings.

“It’s exciting if we look at it as different opportunities, new opportunities, to be creative,” said Mark O’Brien, president at the DDB North America division of DDB Worldwide, an Omnicom ad agency. “Persuasion is an art, not a science.”

Because of innovations like social media, the model has evolved from “trying to connect people with brands” to “trying to connect people with people to connect with brands,” he added. “Agencies that have made an effort to bring in fresh talent are getting hotter.”

Mr. Senay said rough patches are likely during the transition. For instance, referring to the employees who have worked on public relations assignments at the agency, he said, “about a third are turned on by” the new vision, “about a third will go along with it and about a third will not get it.”

To promote its new identity, FleishmanHillard is introducing a quarterly digital magazine, FleishmanHillard True. And a television, print, outdoor and online ad campaign that is being created internally, with a budget estimated at $750,000, is to begin this week. “Be as you wish to be seen,” a 15-second commercial proclaims.