Donny Deutsch becoming Bravo's love guru

Bravo is getting another millionaire matchmaker in sometime adman Donny Deutsch, who will reinvent himself as a relationship expert as host of an upcoming show called Love Live. The live, half-hour program will premiere as a special at the end of January, with the potential of becoming a regular series, reports the New York Post. As the paper points out, Deutsch's expertise in terms of relationships may derive mostly from having been in lots of them. (He's been married twice, for starters.) On the new show, the 53-year-old ex-host of MSNBC's The Big Idea will field questions from Skype, Twitter and e-mail and dispense wisdom to the lovelorn. In that regard, we presume he'll return to a favorite mantra repeatedly: When in doubt, take off the shirt.

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Donny Deutsch is caught up in coconut flap

Donny Deutsch keeps offending people lately. Just a few weeks after telling ManCrunch it shouldn't advertise on the Super Bowl, presumably because not enough gay men care about football, the adman raised eyebrows during an appearance on The Joy Behar Show by calling Florida senatorial candidate Marco Rubio a "coconut." Rubio is of Cuban descent. Conservative watchdog NewsBusters jumped all over his Donnyness, noting that the term is considered an ethnic slur for someone who's tan on the outside but white on the inside. I'm not sure that fits what Donny was saying, which was basically that Rubio is a bit of a nutcase. Deutsch issued an apology on Twitter anyway, saying he meant no harm and didn't realize the term coconut can have racial overtones.

—Posted by Brian Morrissey

Filed under Controversy, Deutsch, Morrissey, Speedo
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Donny Deutsch gives in, gets a BlackBerry

Until recently, it shouldn't have come as a surprise if Donny Deutsch was late responding to your e-mail. The talk-show host and chairman of the agency that bears his name was a staunch technophobe who shunned the BlackBerry, he told the CMO Executive Summit on Tuesday. But Deutsch recently gave in to the inevitable, after a pretty incredible streak of going without a smartphone. Deutsch admitted he's ambivalent about technology. As a self-described "late adopter," he feels "we're too connected as a society." That's an interesting take from someone in the communications business. But Deutsch is a Big Idea man. He told marketers not to get caught up in all the latest and greatest technology. The fundamentals of marketing, he said, are still about coming up with an "anthemic truth" and plugging in the rest.

—Posted by Brian Morrissey

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Speedo is sick and tired of all those jokes

MediaDailyNews has a piece on Speedo’s efforts to “gain a beachhead as a fashion and lifestyle marketer.” Primarily, this seems to mean getting people to forget the only thing they associate with Speedo—i.e., the super-short swimming trunks made popular by such celebrities as Mark Spitz and Donny Deutsch. Speedo actually does have all kinds of sportswear lines, only one of which carries the unfortunate brand name of Fastskin. U.S. Olympic gold medalists Michael Phelps and Amanda Beard both endorse the brand, and Beard was scheduled to meet fans at a Speedo store in Key West on a recent episode of MTV’s The Real World. Unfortunately, something got screwed up, and hardly anyone showed. Maybe Speedo should think about having some fun with the stereotype instead. There isn’t a person out there who doesn’t have a mental picture of a Speedo, for better or worse. That has to count for something.

Filed under Michael Phelps, Speedo
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Joan Rivers wants to find a date for Donny Deutsch, and it could be YOU!

That unlikely headline comes straight from an e-mail sent out Monday to JDate members and forwarded to us. It’s unclear if the “it could be YOU!” part is meant to sound exciting or terrifying, but the offer to win a date with everyone’s favorite adman/talk-show host/sunbather seems to be legit. The e-mail explains: “Joan is looking for attractive and outgoing female JDate members between the ages of 30-40 to appear on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. Audience members will select their favorite female candidate to go on a date with Donny Deutsch.” The JDate women were instructed to e-mail a photo to NBC Universal; a chosen few will participate in something called a “speed dating contest” on Tuesday; then Joan will select finalists to appear on Deutsch’s show on Thursday. We have no idea if Donny is having a hard time finding a date these days or if this has something to do with a segment on online dating. Perhaps there are fewer ladies at CNBC to flirt with/fantasize about than there were at the agency. Rivers certainly has relevant experience, though, having had a profile up on Match.com at one point. As Defamer put it: “Behind those dead, plastic eyes is a woman with the same needs and wants as all of us.”

—Posted by Tim Nudd

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Exclusive photo from the Donny-brook!

You may have heard about the art director who got fired from Deutsch for sending around old pictures of Donny in a skimpy swimsuit. But for some strange reason, no one’s run any of the photos. (Not even The New York Post, which had a whole item on the firing over the weekend but included a picture of “industry heartthrob" Alex Bogusky—their words, not ours.) So, as a service to our loyal readers, here’s one of the pictures that got the art director canned. Notice the Joey Buttafuoco-style hairdo, prominent tan lines and what appears to be a pre-personal trainer bod. Donny couldn’t be reached for comment.

The picture ain’t pretty, but neither is the plight of the art director, Jeison Rodriguez, who admitted to AdFreak that while he “should have been reprimanded,” being fired seemed a bit much. A 10-year Deutsch vet, Rodriguez sounded positively wistful, recalling the days when he perceived Donny as “always being able to look at himself and laugh.”

Now here’s the follow-up: It seems e-mail, the very thing that got Rodriguez in hot water, is also getting him out of it—and leading to further distribution of the Donny pics. The firing incident, which actually dates back to late January, stimulated Rodriguez’s friend Mark Koelfgen to send around an e-mail to help his friend get a new job, with the offensive pics attached! Koelfgen, who also once worked at Deutsch, said of the pictures, “Hold up your hand if you didn’t go through a Billy Ray Cyrus stage.” Fortunately for Rodriguez, the e-mail campaign worked. (He now has a freelance gig.) Strangely the e-mail, having made the rounds throughout the ad industry, has tapped into not only empathy for Rodriguez, but also a weird dynamic in which at least one agency thought about riding Donny’s coattails for its own gain. Rodriguez told us that in addition to hearing from Crispin’s Bogusky and BBDO’s Eric Silver, he also got an offer from Modernista! in Boston to bankroll his job search and “put some sort of publicity thing in the trades.” Rodriguez declined; Modernista! could not be reached for comment.

Below are partial contents of Koelfgen’s e-mail, though we're not vouching for this version of how the pictures got into the art director's hands. We hear he got them off the company server. It’s a poem, of sorts:

Today my friend Jeison Rodriguez was abruptly fired.
He's [sic] was an art director at Deutsch for close to a decade.

Jeison wasn't fired for incompetence.
He's a damn fine art director. And a gifted designer.
He was fired for e-mailing some pictures of Donny Deutsch.
Pictures Donny had taken of himself.
I'll enclose them so you see what I mean.

I worked for Donny.
I have no axe [sic] to grind.
He payed [sic] me regular.
But the more I think about this, the more it bothers me.

I can't speak for anybody else.
But you'll never see me squeeze my greasy carcass into a speedo.
And if I do, I'll never have a picture taken.
And if I do, I'll never keep it.
And if I do, I'll never give it to an art director with a scanner and some spare time.
And If I do, he's more than welcome to send it to whoever he wants.

It was probably stupid for Jeison to have done this.
But ultimately, I think he's a victim of ruthless vanity.

I'll hop off my soapbox now.

And get to the point:

if you need a talented freelance AD in the NYC area --or know somebody
who might--please have them get in touch with Jeison. You won't be
disappointed. I promise.

Thanks,

mk!

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

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