Nothing Sells Like Celebrity |
New York Times - United States - EARLY last year, marketing executives at Totes Isotoner, a Cincinnati company that had spent the previous 30 years churning out a reliable lineup of humble umbrellas, crowded around a computer and listened to a teenage singer from Barbados named Rihanna breeze through a tune titled, appropriately, “Umbrella.”
The song, not yet released, had commercial, jingle-ready lyrics and a stick-in-your-head hook: “You can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh.” Totes, which hadn’t deployed celebrity endorsements since the former N.F.L. quarterback Dan Marino hawked its gloves more than a decade earlier, was smitten. “Umbrella” became a corporate rallying cry, with the song drifting through Totes’ offices at all hours.
Rihanna and her representatives wanted Totes to do more, however, than merely use her to peddle a product. They wanted Totes to create customized umbrellas featuring sparkly fabrics and glittery charms on the handles — all recommended by the emerging star and her team. Totes also guaranteed the singer a percentage of the sales of the umbrellas.
“Umbrella” went on to become a huge, Grammy-winning hit. And Totes, although it declines to discuss sales data, describes its relationship with Rihanna as “invaluable.” The company, which had never tried such a sweeping design shake-up before, says it now reaches younger shoppers and that traffic on its Web site — which links to Rihanna’s own site — has soared.
“We’ve worked hard to build me and my name up as a brand,” Rihanna says. “We always want to bring an authentic connection to whatever we do. It must be sincere and people have to feel that.”
But where the star ends and the product and pitch begin has grown less and less discernible in the era of the human billboard.
These days, it’s nearly impossible to surf the Internet, open a newspaper or magazine, or watch television without seeing a celebrity selling something, whether it’s umbrellas, soda, cars, phones, medications, cosmetics, jewelry, clothing or even mutual funds.
Nicole Kidman sashays in ads for Chanel No. 5 perfume. Eva Longoria, the bombshellette star of “Desperate Housewives,” sells L’Oréal Paris hair color. Jessica Simpson struts for a hair extension company, HairUWear, and the acne skin-care line Proactiv Solution. And Jamie Lee Curtis spoons up Dannon Activia yogurt while promoting environmentally friendly Honda cars.
Using celebrities for promotion is hardly new. Film stars in the 1940s posed for cigarette companies, and Bob Hope pitched American Express in the late 1950s. Joe Namath slipped into Hanes pantyhose in the 1970s, and Bill Cosby jiggled for Jell-O for three decades. Sports icons like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods elevated the practice, often scoring more in endorsement and licensing dollars than from their actual sports earnings.
But over the last decade, corporate brands have increasingly turned to Hollywood celebrities and musicians to sell their products. Stars showed up in nearly 14 percent of ads last year, according to Millward Brown, a marketing research agency. While that number has more than doubled in the past decade, it is off from a peak of 19 percent in 2004. (Hey, it could be more extreme: Celebrities appear in 24 percent of the ads in India and 45 percent in Taiwan.)
Starlets and aging rockers are likely to continue popping up in ads for a very simple reason: Celebrity sells. If consumers believe that a certain star or singer might actually use the product sales can take off.
“The reality is people want a piece of something they can’t be,” says Eli Portnoy, a branding strategist. “They live vicariously through the products and services that those celebrities are tied to. Years from now, our descendants may look at us and say, ‘God, these were the most gullible people who ever lived.’ “
Newer forces are also propping up the celebrity-endorsement boom. Companies, trying to align themselves ever closer to A-list stars (as well as B-listers, C-listers and reality TV pseudocelebrities) and their quicksilver fame are constantly seeking new ways to merge the already-blurry lines between the commercial and entertainment worlds.
Television programmers and music producers are particularly eager to play along as joint marketing deals offer artists new ways to reach audiences while also defraying their own marketing costs. Celebrities have also grown much more sophisticated about the structure and payouts of endorsement deals.
Last fall, the rapper-impresario Sean Combs created a 50-50 joint venture with Diageo, the spirits giant, for Mr. Combs to be the brand manager of the Ciroc vodka line. Mr. Combs says he made the profit-sharing deal only after refusing to work solely as a pitchman.
“My brand is rocket fuel. It would take this brand 10 years to get to where I can take it in one year,” he says. “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to do just endorsements. I want ownership.”
In the few short years since she exploded onto the music scene, Rihanna, now 20, has been involved in about a dozen endorsement and licensing deals. Behind the scenes, her representatives say they vet every offer for two key criteria: how does it support the brand known as Rihanna, and will it help sell more albums?
Rihanna’s commercial for a lip gloss, CoverGirl Wetslicks Fruit Spritzers, opens with outtakes from her steamy “Umbrella” video, then morphs into a close-up of her wearing the lip gloss before ending with a shot of her album cover — leaving viewers possibly confused whether they just saw an ad for a lip gloss or an album. (Totes, for its part, says it cares not a whit about CoverGirl also capitalizing on “Umbrella.” The more the merrier, its executives say, because ubiquity benefits everybody in brandland.)
To be sure, marrying a brand to a celebrity has its perils. Just last month, Christian Dior yanked ads from China featuring the actress Sharon Stone after she suggested that the earthquakes that killed tens of thousands of people in China were karmic retribution for the country’s policies toward Tibet.
Yet no less an expert than the comedian Ellen DeGeneres enthusiastically embraces the endorsement whirlwind.
“It’s flattering that companies think of you and they want to work with you,” she says, adding that she is working with American Express because she liked earlier ads the company did with Jerry Seinfeld. The AmEx ads routinely appear first during her talk show.
Although she says she would consider other endorsement deals, she’s not actively looking. Besides, she says, quality counts.
“I would not feel good if I had made a deal and was making money for something that I’m not proud of and don’t have any control over,” she says. “Now watch, cut to next week and I’m endorsing five different things. Look, bread! Isn’t it great? And what goes well with bread? Mayonnaise!”
BEYONCÉ is hot. Red hot. The numbers prove it.
On the Davie Brown Index, an independent online rating system that was started two years ago to track the marketing power of celebrities, the singing sensation scores 81.31 on a 100-point scale.
The index bases its score on eight metrics, including influence and trendsetting abilities, and is used by corporate marketers to pinpoint desirable boldface names. With that score, Beyoncé is 27th among the more than 1,800 celebrities that the D.B.I. tracks. (The top five are Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Michael Jordan, Morgan Freeman and George Clooney. The presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are 9th and 25th, respectively.)
One Davie Brown category in which most celebrities appear vulnerable is trust. Celebrities are recognizable and appealing, but are often viewed with skepticism. “Trust always seems to be the lowest score among celebrities,” observes Matt Fleming, a Davie Brown account director who helps brands evaluate celebrity talent.
SO if some consumers don’t really trust celebrities, why do they still run out to buy their perfumes or fashions? The answer, some analysts say, has its roots in two seismic shifts in the cultural landscape that began in the late 1990s.
First has been the emergence of Web sites and magazines that chronicle the mundane, daily activities of stars on a 24/7 basis. A voracious public eager to peek at Hollywood celebrities shopping for shoes and buying coffee wanted, in turn, to buy those shoes and drink that coffee themselves.
The other new force has been the explosive growth and mainstreaming of urban hip-hop music and marketing moves by artists like Mr. Combs, Shawn Carter (better known as Jay-Z) and Jennifer Lopez to slap their personal brands on clothing lines, fragrances and other goods. After hip-hop impresarios narrowed the divide between popular music and blatant hucksterism, other popular musicians followed suit.
“Hip-hop completely opened the eyes of other music genres as to how to relate to corporations and not be seen as sellouts,” says Steve Stoute, an ad executive who has matched such celebrities and brands as Justin Timberlake and McDonald’s, Gwen Stefani and Hewlett-Packard, and Jay-Z with Reebok.
The lucre that pours in from successful endorsements, meanwhile, has convinced celebrities that it’s wise to be much more open to such deals than they once were.
“Seven years ago, the belief among celebrities was that perfume was something you did at the end of a career,” says Bernd Beetz, the chief executive of Coty. “Now it’s different and seen as a key step in the start of a career.”
In 2002, Coty released Glow by JLo, in a successful rollout; global sales peaked at $78 million worldwide in 2003 before falling to $41.4 million last year, according to Euromonitor International, which tracks sales of consumer goods.
Glow by JLo is credited with ushering in a wave of celebrity fragrances. Britney Spears, Tim McGraw, Céline Dion, Halle Berry and even the “Grey’s Anatomy” star Patrick Dempsey have either created fragrance lines or are about to do so.
And they want you to know that they really like the products. Really.
“I wear my cologne all of the time,” says Mr. Dempsey, whose fragrance will be introduced by Avon Products in November. “This is a whole different experience and a real education for me, and it has been something that I’ve been involved with every step of the way.”
With consumers facing so many choices these days, an emotional connection with a certain celebrity may make the difference between whether a shopper’s hand stops over one product or moves on to the competition.
The song, not yet released, had commercial, jingle-ready lyrics and a stick-in-your-head hook: “You can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh.” Totes, which hadn’t deployed celebrity endorsements since the former N.F.L. quarterback Dan Marino hawked its gloves more than a decade earlier, was smitten. “Umbrella” became a corporate rallying cry, with the song drifting through Totes’ offices at all hours.
Rihanna and her representatives wanted Totes to do more, however, than merely use her to peddle a product. They wanted Totes to create customized umbrellas featuring sparkly fabrics and glittery charms on the handles — all recommended by the emerging star and her team. Totes also guaranteed the singer a percentage of the sales of the umbrellas.
“Umbrella” went on to become a huge, Grammy-winning hit. And Totes, although it declines to discuss sales data, describes its relationship with Rihanna as “invaluable.” The company, which had never tried such a sweeping design shake-up before, says it now reaches younger shoppers and that traffic on its Web site — which links to Rihanna’s own site — has soared.
“We’ve worked hard to build me and my name up as a brand,” Rihanna says. “We always want to bring an authentic connection to whatever we do. It must be sincere and people have to feel that.”
But where the star ends and the product and pitch begin has grown less and less discernible in the era of the human billboard.
These days, it’s nearly impossible to surf the Internet, open a newspaper or magazine, or watch television without seeing a celebrity selling something, whether it’s umbrellas, soda, cars, phones, medications, cosmetics, jewelry, clothing or even mutual funds.
Nicole Kidman sashays in ads for Chanel No. 5 perfume. Eva Longoria, the bombshellette star of “Desperate Housewives,” sells L’Oréal Paris hair color. Jessica Simpson struts for a hair extension company, HairUWear, and the acne skin-care line Proactiv Solution. And Jamie Lee Curtis spoons up Dannon Activia yogurt while promoting environmentally friendly Honda cars.
Using celebrities for promotion is hardly new. Film stars in the 1940s posed for cigarette companies, and Bob Hope pitched American Express in the late 1950s. Joe Namath slipped into Hanes pantyhose in the 1970s, and Bill Cosby jiggled for Jell-O for three decades. Sports icons like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods elevated the practice, often scoring more in endorsement and licensing dollars than from their actual sports earnings.
But over the last decade, corporate brands have increasingly turned to Hollywood celebrities and musicians to sell their products. Stars showed up in nearly 14 percent of ads last year, according to Millward Brown, a marketing research agency. While that number has more than doubled in the past decade, it is off from a peak of 19 percent in 2004. (Hey, it could be more extreme: Celebrities appear in 24 percent of the ads in India and 45 percent in Taiwan.)
Starlets and aging rockers are likely to continue popping up in ads for a very simple reason: Celebrity sells. If consumers believe that a certain star or singer might actually use the product sales can take off.
“The reality is people want a piece of something they can’t be,” says Eli Portnoy, a branding strategist. “They live vicariously through the products and services that those celebrities are tied to. Years from now, our descendants may look at us and say, ‘God, these were the most gullible people who ever lived.’ “
Newer forces are also propping up the celebrity-endorsement boom. Companies, trying to align themselves ever closer to A-list stars (as well as B-listers, C-listers and reality TV pseudocelebrities) and their quicksilver fame are constantly seeking new ways to merge the already-blurry lines between the commercial and entertainment worlds.
Television programmers and music producers are particularly eager to play along as joint marketing deals offer artists new ways to reach audiences while also defraying their own marketing costs. Celebrities have also grown much more sophisticated about the structure and payouts of endorsement deals.
Last fall, the rapper-impresario Sean Combs created a 50-50 joint venture with Diageo, the spirits giant, for Mr. Combs to be the brand manager of the Ciroc vodka line. Mr. Combs says he made the profit-sharing deal only after refusing to work solely as a pitchman.
“My brand is rocket fuel. It would take this brand 10 years to get to where I can take it in one year,” he says. “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to do just endorsements. I want ownership.”
In the few short years since she exploded onto the music scene, Rihanna, now 20, has been involved in about a dozen endorsement and licensing deals. Behind the scenes, her representatives say they vet every offer for two key criteria: how does it support the brand known as Rihanna, and will it help sell more albums?
Rihanna’s commercial for a lip gloss, CoverGirl Wetslicks Fruit Spritzers, opens with outtakes from her steamy “Umbrella” video, then morphs into a close-up of her wearing the lip gloss before ending with a shot of her album cover — leaving viewers possibly confused whether they just saw an ad for a lip gloss or an album. (Totes, for its part, says it cares not a whit about CoverGirl also capitalizing on “Umbrella.” The more the merrier, its executives say, because ubiquity benefits everybody in brandland.)
To be sure, marrying a brand to a celebrity has its perils. Just last month, Christian Dior yanked ads from China featuring the actress Sharon Stone after she suggested that the earthquakes that killed tens of thousands of people in China were karmic retribution for the country’s policies toward Tibet.
Yet no less an expert than the comedian Ellen DeGeneres enthusiastically embraces the endorsement whirlwind.
“It’s flattering that companies think of you and they want to work with you,” she says, adding that she is working with American Express because she liked earlier ads the company did with Jerry Seinfeld. The AmEx ads routinely appear first during her talk show.
Although she says she would consider other endorsement deals, she’s not actively looking. Besides, she says, quality counts.
“I would not feel good if I had made a deal and was making money for something that I’m not proud of and don’t have any control over,” she says. “Now watch, cut to next week and I’m endorsing five different things. Look, bread! Isn’t it great? And what goes well with bread? Mayonnaise!”
BEYONCÉ is hot. Red hot. The numbers prove it.
On the Davie Brown Index, an independent online rating system that was started two years ago to track the marketing power of celebrities, the singing sensation scores 81.31 on a 100-point scale.
The index bases its score on eight metrics, including influence and trendsetting abilities, and is used by corporate marketers to pinpoint desirable boldface names. With that score, Beyoncé is 27th among the more than 1,800 celebrities that the D.B.I. tracks. (The top five are Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Michael Jordan, Morgan Freeman and George Clooney. The presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are 9th and 25th, respectively.)
One Davie Brown category in which most celebrities appear vulnerable is trust. Celebrities are recognizable and appealing, but are often viewed with skepticism. “Trust always seems to be the lowest score among celebrities,” observes Matt Fleming, a Davie Brown account director who helps brands evaluate celebrity talent.
SO if some consumers don’t really trust celebrities, why do they still run out to buy their perfumes or fashions? The answer, some analysts say, has its roots in two seismic shifts in the cultural landscape that began in the late 1990s.
First has been the emergence of Web sites and magazines that chronicle the mundane, daily activities of stars on a 24/7 basis. A voracious public eager to peek at Hollywood celebrities shopping for shoes and buying coffee wanted, in turn, to buy those shoes and drink that coffee themselves.
The other new force has been the explosive growth and mainstreaming of urban hip-hop music and marketing moves by artists like Mr. Combs, Shawn Carter (better known as Jay-Z) and Jennifer Lopez to slap their personal brands on clothing lines, fragrances and other goods. After hip-hop impresarios narrowed the divide between popular music and blatant hucksterism, other popular musicians followed suit.
“Hip-hop completely opened the eyes of other music genres as to how to relate to corporations and not be seen as sellouts,” says Steve Stoute, an ad executive who has matched such celebrities and brands as Justin Timberlake and McDonald’s, Gwen Stefani and Hewlett-Packard, and Jay-Z with Reebok.
The lucre that pours in from successful endorsements, meanwhile, has convinced celebrities that it’s wise to be much more open to such deals than they once were.
“Seven years ago, the belief among celebrities was that perfume was something you did at the end of a career,” says Bernd Beetz, the chief executive of Coty. “Now it’s different and seen as a key step in the start of a career.”
In 2002, Coty released Glow by JLo, in a successful rollout; global sales peaked at $78 million worldwide in 2003 before falling to $41.4 million last year, according to Euromonitor International, which tracks sales of consumer goods.
Glow by JLo is credited with ushering in a wave of celebrity fragrances. Britney Spears, Tim McGraw, Céline Dion, Halle Berry and even the “Grey’s Anatomy” star Patrick Dempsey have either created fragrance lines or are about to do so.
And they want you to know that they really like the products. Really.
“I wear my cologne all of the time,” says Mr. Dempsey, whose fragrance will be introduced by Avon Products in November. “This is a whole different experience and a real education for me, and it has been something that I’ve been involved with every step of the way.”
With consumers facing so many choices these days, an emotional connection with a certain celebrity may make the difference between whether a shopper’s hand stops over one product or moves on to the competition.
Categories : Musician News, Celebrity Endorsement News
Posted 6/22/2008 12:06:48 AM | Permalink
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