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.

Mike Darnell, a Reality Show Creator, Is Leaving Fox

Mr. Darnell, who has supervised reality programming for Fox since before the term reality show entered the lexicon, said Friday that he was leaving the network at the end of the month.

He oversaw Fox’s most popular reality shows (“So You Think You Can Dance,” “MasterChef,” “The X Factor” in addition to “Idol”) and was also its most outlandish innovator (remember “Temptation Island” and “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?”).

Mr. Darnell and his superiors at Fox said that he was offered a new contract but decided to leave. Nonetheless, there was immediate speculation that he was a casualty of the tough television season at Fox, particularly with “American Idol.”

Fox’s audiences have fallen by more than 15 percent in the season that ends this month. For “Idol,” once the most popular show on American television, the fall has been steeper. While the slide is not necessarily surprising, since the show has been on for more than a decade, the ratings have been distressing for Fox and its parent company, News Corporation.

When the company reported first-quarter earnings, it said Fox’s ad revenue had declined in large part because of the performance of “Idol.” Now the network is contemplating a complete makeover of the show, possibly by replacing last season’s judges with a panel of “Idol” alumni like Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Hudson. Such a move would emphasize the past star-making success of the series.

On Friday there were reports that Ms. Hudson, a finalist on the third season of “Idol,” had signed on for the next season, which will start in January; Fox declined to comment.

Mr. Darnell, in a brief telephone interview, warmly recalled the days when “Idol” drew 30 million viewers a night and acknowledged that it would “never be as big as it once was.”

But no other series will be, either, he added: “I don’t think that’s possible in television anymore,” with the exception of a few one-time events like the Super Bowl. He expressed confidence about the future of “Idol,” drawing an analogy between it and the 35-year-old “Saturday Night Live” on NBC.

“How many times have you heard that ‘S.N.L.’ is dead?” he asked. “Then a new crop comes in and it’s a big success again.”

“There’s something about these brands,” he said, asserting that “the audience wants to like them.”

Mr. Darnell, whose title is president of alternative entertainment, gained notice in the TV world for his risk-taking and exuberance. But over-the-top reality TV shows are now less the domain of broadcast networks like Fox than of niche cable channels like TLC and A&E. Mr. Darnell has not had a particularly newsworthy show in quite some time. (Franchises he helped birth, however, like “MasterChef,” continue to gain viewers and inspire spinoffs.)

“He brilliantly paved the way for all of us, creating a powerful entertainment genre that audiences can’t get enough of,” said Ryan Seacrest, the host of “American Idol.”

Mr. Darnell, 51, joined the network in 1994 as the director of specials; among the most infamous of those was “Alien Autopsy (Fact or Fiction)” in 1995. In 2000, The New York Times called him “the Svengali of sometimes gruesome, sometimes comical specials that took television to new heights — or depths — of perversity.”

Mr. Darnell said he was leaving to pursue other opportunities, without elaborating. Fox executives emphasized that it was his choice. Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, said in a news release: “Mike took risks at a critical time and was a pioneering force in shaping the reality programming genre that exists today. He’s a smart and fearless executive who will be missed.”

Mr. Darnell, asked if his exit was related to “Idol’s” ratings weakness, said, “Of course not.”

“Every time my deal comes up, I go through this excruciating decision process,” he said, and this time he concluded he should leave.

“I was able to make this the Wild West,” he said, referring to Fox and its willingness to try stunt shows like “Man vs. Beast” and “World’s Scariest Police Chases.”

“But the Wild West has moved,” he added. “Cable, digital, it’s everywhere now.”

Putting “Idol” aside, he said his best show was “Joe Millionaire,” the 2003 dating competition that tricked female contestants into believing that the aforementioned Joe was a rich bachelor. Joe was actually a construction worker. About 35 million viewers tuned in for the finale.

USA Network to Explore Sitcoms and Reality Shows

For most of the past decade the USA Network has lived by the mantra “blue skies,” which has translated into programming a string of upbeat hourlong drama hits, like “Burn Notice” and “Royal Pains.”

That strategy has paid off, with USA ranking as the most-watched entertainment network on cable for eight straight years. So why is the network going to make a new pitch to advertisers on May 16 that emphasizes areas previously little explored by USA, like situation comedy and reality shows?

The most obvious reason: USA paid a hefty price — $1 million to $1.5 million an episode — three years ago to acquire reruns of the hugely popular ABC comedy “Modern Family.” Those episodes become available this fall, so a shift toward some comedy-based nights was inevitable.

But the network’s top program executives also acknowledge that in order to grow, and to maintain the top position in a competitive cable environment, it is time to branch out into new programming directions.

At its advertiser presentation next week, USA is expected to announce that it has ordered its first two original sitcoms, as well as several new reality shows, and a new drama that breaks with the USA tradition by taking a bit of a walk on the dark side.

“One of the dances any network does, and we’re doing one now, is the balance between breadth and depth,” said Jeff Wachtel, the co-president of USA. “We are a very broad general entertainment network in a world that is increasingly about the depth of the commitment.”

He added, “We have a reservoir of good will. Now that’s great, but it’s also a trap. Because if anybody imputes a formula to you, you really are in danger of being formulaic. We’ve got to challenge the audience.”

Other cable networks have been doing that with great success: A&E has the reality hit “Duck Dynasty;” History collected big audiences for “The Bible;” FX has forged a reputation for dark dramas like “Justified;” and AMC has the biggest drama in all of television with “The Walking Dead.”

“There are a lot of networks infringing on USA’s territory,” said Derek Baine, a media analyst with SNL Kagan. “Changing the program lineup can be done. You just have to tread carefully because it can be jarring for the audience.”

USA’s numbers are unquestionably potent. Under Bonnie Hammer, who now is the chairwoman of the cable entertainment group for NBCUniversal, USA has been a profit machine. In 2012, the network exceeded $1 billion in profit for the first time, and it projects the number to be higher in 2013.

USA still has the top overall audience among cable entertainment networks with an average of 2.92 million viewers, ahead of the 2.43 million for the History Channel. USA is down slightly, 2 percent, this season.

It has remained No. 1, though narrowly, over TBS in one of the two audience groups that dominates sales to advertisers — viewers ages 25 to 54. But it trails TBS this season so far in the most important audience category, viewers ages 18 to 49.

That might not be bad news for USA, however, and not only because TBS gets a springtime bounce from college and pro basketball. The big winner for TBS is its package of repeats of the hit CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” which runs as often as 16 to 20 times a week on TBS.

Chris McCumber, the network’s other co-president, said USA would most likely use “Modern Family” much as TBS has used “Big Bang” — all over its schedule, sometimes filling a whole night of prime time.

“We want to be careful not to overuse it,” Mr. McCumber said. “But we think it will raise all boats in prime time.”

There is some question about whether “Modern Family” can perform as “Big Bang” has. It is a filmed comedy without a laugh track, and those tend to repeat less well than taped shows with audience laughter.

DealBook: Easing of Rules for Banks Acknowledges Reality

The New York TimesJamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said the regulations known as Basel III were “blatantly anti-American.”

When a global committee of regulators and central bankers agreed to a new set of rules for the banking system a year and a half ago, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, told The Financial Times, “I’m very close to thinking the United States shouldn’t be in Basel anymore. I would not have agreed to rules that are blatantly anti-American.”

Over the last weekend, Mr. Dimon finally got what he had wanted: a form of deregulation of sorts. The new international capital requirements for banks, known as Basel III — apologies if your eyes are glazing over — were significantly relaxed by regulators.

Instead of requiring banks to maintain, by 2015, a certain amount of assets that can quickly be turned into cash, the most stringent deadline was pushed to 2019. Perhaps more important, the type of assets that could be counted in a bank’s liquidity requirement was changed to be more flexible, including securities backed by mortgages, for example, instead of simply sovereign debt.

This sounds boring, but it is important stuff. Increasing bank capital and liquidity requirements — think of it as the size of a bank’s rainy day fund — is arguably more significant than all of the new laws in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The more capital a bank is required to hold, the lower the chance it could suffer a run on the bank like Lehman Brothers did in 2008.

Given memories of the financial crisis, the idea that regulators would loosen rules even a smidgen is considered a huge giveaway. The conventional wisdom is that the banks are the big winners and the regulators are, once again, patsies, capitulating under pressure to the all-powerful financial industry. The headlines tell the story: “Banks Win 4-Year Delay as Basel Liquidity Rule Loosened,” Bloomberg declared. The Financial Times splashed, “ ‘Massive Softening’ of Basel Rules.” “Bank Regulators Retreat,” the Huffington Post said. Reuters described the new regulations as a “light touch.”

Mayra Rodríguez Valladares, a managing principal at MRV Associates, a regulatory consulting firm, put it this way, “With every part of Basel III that is gutted, we are increasingly back where we were at the eve of the crisis.” She went on to say, “In today’s financial world, regulators pretend to supervise while banks pretend to be liquid.”

But this is a knee-jerk response.

While there is no question that the original rules would do a better job preventing the next 100-year flood in the banking system, their quick adoption most likely would have created their own drag on the economy because bank lending would most likely have been curtailed.

“If Basel had been implemented this year as written, it almost certainly would have thrown the U.S. and other economies into a recession more than going over the fiscal cliff ever would have,” John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a research organization promoting free markets, wrote. Mr. Berlau, who may have a penchant for hyperbole, had been calling the deadline the Basel cliff. He added, “Basel III has been delayed, and for Main Street growth and financial stability, that is all to the good.”

Mr. Berlau is right. In truth, the reason that regulators ultimately chose to relax the rules was simple practicality: many banks in Europe and some in the United States would have never been able to meet the requirements without significantly reducing the amount of credit they were to extend to Main Street over the next two years, according to people involved in the Basel decision process.

That’s the other side of the regulatory coin that Main Street often forgets about. At the time that the original rules were written in 2010, the consensus among economists was that the global economy would be in much better shape today than it is.

“Nobody set out to make it stronger or weaker, but to make it more realistic,” Mervyn A. King, governor of the Bank of England, explained.

Let’s be clear: high capital requirements are a good thing to do to reduce risk in the system. And there is no question that the banks, especially in the United States, are in a much stronger position than they were. Let’s also stipulate that the Basel committee did a horrible job before the financial crisis in setting and enforcing proper standards. Basel’s loosening of rules before the crisis that worsened the pain of the global banking system.

But the push for stricter rules just as the global economy is trying to nurse itself back to health, simply to satisfy the public, rather to find a solution that balances the risks to the economy and the banking system, would have been a mistake. The chances of a leverage-induced crisis from Wall Street banks right now is quite low.

The challenge for regulators is making sure their memories aren’t so short that they seek to scale back the rules again.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 8, 2013

An earlier version of this column misstated the affiliation of John Berlau. He is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, not the Bastiat Institute.

Shortcuts: Grappling With a New Economic Reality

I’M finding myself having the same conversation over and over with friends whose children are applying to college. We want them to be able to go to the best institution they can get into, but we may not be able to afford it.

And we’re having a hard time pairing our expectations with the reality.

It’s not that we’ve been immune from the economic turmoil that has troubled the country. The magazine my husband worked at folded in 2009, and though we were luckier than most and he eventually found other work, it was a scary time.

We dealt with it by paring back on eating out, vacations and other nonessentials. But it wasn’t until we faced the reality of a college tuition bill that we realized how difficult it was to let go of the assumptions we’d had all our lives.

And we’re not the only ones. Consider the students graduating from college who expected the same kind of lifestyle — or better — than their parents had and the 60-somethings who anticipated a comfortable, if not luxurious, retirement.

“We have made an upper-middle-class income and are living an upper-middle-class life, but with how the economy has played out, we need to make more middle-class decisions, and we refuse to do it,” said a friend of mine, who asked that her name not be used because she didn’t want her friends to know her financial situation. “We live paycheck to paycheck. We’re in debt, but we can’t wrap our heads around not being able to” allow their son to apply to an expensive private university.

“When we had these kids 18 years ago, we started saving for college,” she said. “We moved to an expensive town so they could soar and achieve and go as high as they could.” Then, her husband lost his job and took a while to find a new one.

“The economic landscape has changed, but we’re still rooted in our attitude that we had when we had these kids 18 years ago,” she said. “It’s so hard to realign our attitudes with the economic reality.”

And she knows that she and her husband are not doing their children any favors if they end up heavily in debt and have no money for retirement.

My friend is not alone in grappling with this dichotomy. Findings from the 14th quarterly Allstate-National Journal Heartland Monitor Polls released in October, which explored perceptions about upward mobility among Americans, found that nearly half of those surveyed say they had more opportunity to get ahead than their parents did.

But only about one-third said they believed there would be more opportunity for their children than in the past. The poll surveyed 1,000 to 1,250 people, depending on the question, by phone.

“The majority believe they will get ahead and live the American dream in their lifetime,” said Joan Walker, executive vice president for corporate relations at Allstate. “But they worry whether that dream will be available for their children. Americans understand that risk has been transferred from institutions to individuals and the future is very uncertain. Now, it’s not so much about getting ahead, but holding steady.”

Jennifer Turner, who lives outside Harrisburg, Pa., has younger children — 6 and 8 years old — so the tuition dilemma is still distant on the horizon. But ever since her husband lost his job at a stone quarry in 2009 and started his own auto body repair and refinishing shop, times have been tough.

“I grew up on a dairy farm and money was always tight,” she said. “We had secondhand clothes and didn’t eat out. Those things aren’t bad, but I thought we would be able to do more.”

She attended a four-year college and foresaw an easier life than her parents had.

“But we’re living paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “We’re trying to stretch it and sometimes it doesn’t stretch.” After-school activities like dance for her daughter and wrestling and gymnastics for her son are a thing of the past.

Will her daughter be able to attend college?

“If she does really good in school and gets scholarships and works,” Ms. Turner said.

But after resisting the idea for a long time, she said she was finally coming to terms with the reality of her life.

“We may not be able to do what other people do. I see commercials for Disney and would love to be able to give that to my kids,” she said. “But I need to accept that I can’t, instead of fighting it and being resentful.”

The expectation that life will just continue improving generation by generation is also part of the thinking of those now in college and in their 20s.