It's being reported that Playboy's (NYSE: PLA) Hugh Hefner's relationship with Holly Madison is over. Madison, as you probably know, was Hefner's head girlfriend, but he has two others as well: Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquadt. The four of them star in a reality show called The Girls Next Door, which runs on the E! channel. It's a pretty fun show, although it does make me maddeningly envious of Hef's lifestyle. That aside, it seems to be a decent brand ambassador for the Playboy image. Unfortunately, the popularity of the show hasn't been enough to offset losses at the media company. Playboy's stock currently sits below $3 a share. It is the exact opposite of one of Hef's playmates: downright depressingly ugly.

Well, I can't really comment as to how the Hefner/Madison affair will turn out. Will she go back with him? Is this just a publicity stunt? I simply don't know. However, I would imagine that, with Playboy's stock in the dumps, a breakup might be an event that could be exploited to help out the company. Let's face it: the whole three-girlfriend thing is pretty much an orchestrated machine anyway. So, if Madison truly does feel like she's ready to move on with her career, I think Hef should clean house and get rid of the other two girls as well. Then, he could go on a search for three new girls next door (or maybe he should search for more, why stop at just three?). It could be an integrated media campaign spanning the magazine, the website, and a new reality show.

What would you do if you were fired from your job as a top advertising executive at Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) after a torrid love affair with a subordinate, and then read about the ensuing drama and steamy emails in The Wall Street Journal?

Head to reality television, of course! B-list reality shows have given disgraced former stars like Jose Canseco (The Surreal Life) another 15 minutes of fame, and Julie Roehm wants in on the act too: Fortune reports that Ms. Roehm will be a judge on Jingles, an upcoming CBS show where contestants compete to write jingles for TV commercials. I can't wait to see that one. What's next? Who Wants to be a Roadkill Collector? I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that Jingles will last one season.

She's still living in Bentonville because she hasn't been able to sell her house.

I give some props to Ms. Roehm for capitalizing on her fame, but I think she has to be careful about not marginalizing herself by morphing into a d-list celebrity on the strength of her relationship with a coworker. But she's also running her own marketing consulting firm, so maybe she's keeping it balanced.

Warner Bros., the television-and-movies subsidiary of Time Warner, is stepping up efforts to cash in on the big-money, low-budget industry of Reality -- reality television, that is. The company intends to launch a TV production unit, called Warner Horizon Television, to produce even lower budget reality television programs.

And how does Warner Horizon Television plan to lower the cost of the already pathetically cheap reality television shows?

Well, according to Peter Roth, President of Warner Bros. Television, the studio will limit taping days, shooting locations and "talent" pay. This new production model will reduce costs to about $500,000 less per episode than what a "traditional" (read: watchable) TV show costs per episode.

If you're interested, Warner Horizon, I have a couple of ideas for some very low-budget reality shows: