The Pros and Cons of Celebrity Campaigns

This is CPG Insiders, the podcast that helps consumer packaged goods companies survive and thrive in business. Now, your hosts, Mark Young and Rob Taylor. Welcome, everybody, to this edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host, Mark Young with my co host, Rob Taylor.

Hello, everybody out there in podcast land.

I love both of you.

Well, actually, you know, you say that.

I know. I'm kidding.

I know.

Because we really planned on this show.

Only being, you know, for a limited.

Audience, but it's actually developing a very large audience.

Yeah, we're getting some decent. I was looking at the stats the other day. We're getting some nice listenership. So thank you everybody out there who's listening to us.

I know it is good that you know that people are appreciating it and we're hearing from people a lot, too.

Yeah, it's really cool. I got actually a nice little note on LinkedIn. I saw it, I think it was today, and then I was on a client call and he said that he just listened to our last episode or one of our last episodes and said how much you enjoyed it. So thank you to our great guests and our listeners.

So, Rob, today, what we're going to.

Talk about is we're going to talk about celebrities. And you and I get these phone calls a lot.

Yeah, we get phone calls from people that, you know, well, we want to.

Have a celebrity or should we have a celebrity? And I thought we'd do a couple of things today. One, let's talk about what value celebrities bring. And then let's talk about what's the best way to get them something that always. Now you've had this call, too. My mother's brother's next door neighbor's cousin's roommate is friends with Brad Pitt. So we can get him.

Cool. Let's get him. I like Brad Pitt.

So the first thing I want to tell everybody, it doesn't matter if your mother's brother's cousin's next door neighbor's roommate is friends with Brad Pitt. It doesn't even matter. Brad Pitt says, yeah, this is a great product. Yeah, I'd love to do that because it's going to go to an agent.

Yep.

And when it gets to the agent, unless he probably is your next door neighbor or your best friend, the agent's taking over. And it's all going to be about negotiation and money. So starting off with that. But let's start with what's the purpose behind having a celebrity on a commercial?

I mean, when we've looked at it, we tend to Use them to earn credibility or buy credibility or transfer the celebrity's attributes to the product. So if we've made it make really good sense for young brands that have some promise, that may be difficult to believe or maybe in a really crowded marketplace, to kind of cut through the clutter, we're just trying to transfer your feelings about that celebrity, whether you want to be them, whether you want to be like them, whether you want to. Whether you trust them to our product, which credibility is obviously the biggest one. If you have a good celebrity that's likable and you see that celebrity, it's really easy for me to think, or the user or viewer to think, you know, I like that product because. Or I will like that product because I like that celebrity.

Now, there's also simple. There's also celebrities where they have, like, some kind of category credibility.

Yeah. So appropriate for the product, essentially.

So like John Walsh from America's Most Wanted selling home security.

Right. So.

Or Chuck Norris selling the Total Gym.

Instant credibility. You believe that they chose to be associated with that product. Or it makes sense. Like it's not a lot of work to train her to associate talent a with product.

Right. You see Chuck Norris, you say he's 78 years old and he still looks.

Like he can kick my butt. He probably knows what he's talking about with how to use an exercise machine.

Exactly.

Now, another big feature to having celebrities is the average person gets hit with anywhere from 6 to 20,000 advertising messages a day. Sometimes a favorite celebrity can stop you from flipping a channel or at least get you to pay attention for a second.

Yeah, that's one I think probably the most basic use of a celebrity is attention, even their voice. So, I mean, you take a good celebrity voice and put it as the voiceover of the commercial, or you put it as the radio commercial, or you use it on in digital. And there's an arresting feature to using a celebrity, whether it's visually or in the audio. Definitely will stop most people if they recognize them, just to see what they're A familiar voice.

If you hear somebody say, that's a disaster, then you kind of, you know. Voices. Right.

You know. Now, in today's world, Rob, you think about right now, we have a very polarizing political world, and it's very easy for a brand to get tied to a celebrity that can very quickly lose half of the country.

That is a danger, you know, and it's always been a danger. But I think in the last five, 10 years, it has been even worse.

You know, I Mean, it's really tough now.

Yeah.

I mean, and it can be on either side. You could have a Chuck Woolery on one side who's conservative, but you could have an Alec Baldwin on the other side who's going to be just as polarizing in the other direction. So.

And people who feel strongly politically will, you know, they'll pass on a brand if they see somebody that they really, really dislike. You know, Alec Baldwin's a great example.

Mm. Absolutely. Great actor.

I'm not gonna say great.

I think he's pretty good.

He's been in some fine stuff.

Yeah, I think he's pretty good actor. I think he's a talented guy, but he has some very strong views.

That's the written. You know, that's why you put in certain things in their contracts. Or if they do something that ruins their brand, that you can potentially get out. Right. If they get arrested. If Shia LaBeouf is pitching your coffee and he gets arrested again, you can dump him as your spokesperson.

Now, we have a research tool that we use, which is MRI or me. Mri. And in that, we can look at a lot of demographics and look at products and who's buying the products. And sometimes we can tease information out that tells us if that product has a particular political leaning or if that product has. Whether it could be Republican, Democratic. And it also measures conservative and liberal. If I had a product that was heavily tilted toward one group or the other, would it then make sense to have a celebrity who's tied to that political side?

To me, yeah. I mean, because they're probably known to their politics. If they're a known entity, which a lot of them are, it's hard to not have a political stance now, especially in the celebrity world. If they're known, I think it makes perfect sense.

So if I was, you know, if I was selling shotguns and I went and hired Ted Nugent.

Right. Odds are good if you're in that market to buy a gun or a shotgun or you're. You're. You not turned off by him, though? He's probably not the best example because he. I mean, you do have some people that just rub folks the wrong way. But I think as a really.

Ted's extreme. I was using an extreme example.

An extreme example. But, you know, the people who are Second Amendment folks would not be turned off by him, would know his position because he's very vocal about it. I think he makes a good sense from a credibility standpoint.

And it does pay.

I think it does pay for advertisers. To look into the MRI research and to see which way their product may tilt one way or the other.

I mean, it definitely helps, though, with a lot of stuff. Not just celebrity, obviously, where you position it in the media landscape and all sorts of things. Not to divert the conversation, but yeah, it's very useful. Very useful.

Now, it's also not uncommon to use celebrities. As an example, you might use one celebrity on one set of television networks.

And a different celebrity doing the same.

Brand on some different networks.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you have a lot of money to spend.

So maybe if you're doing.

You want to hit the Fox News audience, you use somebody who's a known conservative.

And then you have somebody who's.

More on the left. When you hit the CNN and the.

MSNBC audiences in that, to me, it makes sense. If it makes sense, as dumb as that sounds. But I mean, if you're going to split your money that way, I feel like consumers are pretty savvy. And if they go to your website, you can't segregate who they see necessarily. Unless it's cnn, somebody, dot com CNN or whatever. But people will dig a little bit, and if they are turned off or turned on by celebrities, they'll find. To me, that's a risky bet.

I'll tell you somebody who I thought did a great job with this quite a few years back.

Yeah.

And I think it was Pepsi.

And they hired James Carvel and Bob Dole.

Look it up real quick. Keep going.

I think it was Bob Dole. So here you had this Republican senator and James Carville, known liberal, and they.

Had them out doing. It was like they were out on.

A bus tour of Washington, D.C. together.

It's like they were hanging out as buddies.

That's funny.

And it was because it was like.

First off, no matter which side of.

The aisle you were on, you were going to hate. And like, one per. You know, you're gonna hate one guy.

And like the other one.

But it was almost like you couldn't get mad at the company because both sides were there.

Yeah. It's a pretty clever use of two different talents. I think it says Coke is the one.

Was it Coke that did it?

Yeah.

And did I get the people right? I know James Carville was one of them.

He's one of them. The other one says, I don't think it's Bob Dull, it's somebody else.

But a known conservative. But it was actually a cute commercial, too.

Bill Frist.

Okay. And it was a cute spot, and.

It made sense to me. It's like, does it make sense? And, you know, we'll have clients come to us and say, well, I really like this guy. Can we get him to pitch my. Can I get him to pitch my brand? Can I get him to pitch my products? And to me, it always comes down to, does it make sense from a believability standpoint? Does it align with the brand? Does it align with the consumer we're trying to reach? Or do you just have a man crush on this celebrity? But also, does it make financial sense? Is it better to put that sizable amount of money behind media energy or behind, you know, high production values in general? There's also that factor where it's just sometimes it doesn't make financial sense to put a celebrity in a commercial. You don't need them necessarily. You know, if you have some really breakout product, you may not need a celebrity to get attention or to. For credibility, but it doesn't always make sense to just put a celebrity in an ad. It's an easy way, obviously, to gain some of those things, but if you.

Not always necessary.

I think if you have a really good story and, and a solid product that communicates really easily to the, you know, clearly to the viewer and user or whatever, I don't think you need one necessarily. It's great to have, you know, all the, all the firepower you can get is great, but if it's, if somebody's way too expensive, you really have to think through where is the best use of that money. Now, thinking of our clients, most of them, you could probably get a lot more mileage out of 50 grand in media than you would throwing 50 grand at a human being. I mean, to me, that's. How do you do it without a celebrity? Is probably my first approach.

So one thing I want people to understand, as somebody who has hired a lot of celebrities and represented celebrities, a lot of clients will come to us with the idea, well, let's see if we can hire him. And we won't pay him very much money. We'll give him some interest in the company. So one thing I want to tell people is any decent celebrity is getting 10 offers a month offering them ownership in a company. So as a rule, that doesn't work. It's worked occasionally, but as a rule it doesn't. As a rule, the agent's looking for money and the agent wants to see cash because the agent isn't going to get paid on a percentage of stock. He's going to get paid on cash. So even if there is some Kind of stock deal. There's going to be cash involved. The second thing, and we'll get you to comment on this is one of the mistakes I see people make is they will call us up and they say, we want to have John Smith. You should never get yourself committed that this is the only celebrity that we can have. You need a list of them.

Yeah. And you agree? I think you just, you, you back yourself into a corner, you paint yourself into a corner if you just have the one. And they, you know, that can bend you over the barrel.

Right. Especially if they realize that you just have to have them.

Right. So to me, that's a very cautious thing. It's good to have somebody negotiating on your behalf as a brand as opposed to just going in it yourself. So you can have a bad cop, if you will. So when the deal is done, you still have a decent relationship or the person still wants to work with you. Right.

Because the agency did the negotiating.

Right. But yeah, a list of people who are appropriate. So you have kind of look in the same tier of celebrities. And what do you call that, the thing you put out there to get a group of talents. Yeah.

We'll sometimes do a favor.

Nation favorite.

One of the things that I do see, most agents represent many people. So usually what I'll do if the client says, well, we really like whoever this person here. So the first thing that I like to do is say, okay, so we're looking at Regis Philbin. Let's make a list here of six other people who would be similar to Regis Philbin. Now let's go find out who Regis Philbin is represented by and let's find out who else they represent. Because in a lot of cases, I'll talk to the agent and say, well, you handle Regis Philbin and you handle Drew Carey. So I could use either one of them. Here's how you know, this is the range that I'm thinking of. So immediately the agent knows without me having to rub it in his face. They're looking at multiple people. And if he's talking to me about two or three of my people, he's probably talking to agent across the street about two or three of his people. You're also giving the agent room to figure out who can I sell this to the easiest? Who's going to be most likely to want to take this business.

Right.

The other thing you have to look at is you have to look at the talents association to the topic. So as an example would be we did a deal for Chuck Woolery with A dating site, A dating service. Okay. They pay three times more than what we would normally charge for Chuck Woolery. Why? Because he was a host of Love Connection. He had the authority. And here's the other thing that agents and celebrities look at. They look at what's. If I take this deal, what is the odds that some other company in the same category is going to come to me with another offer? And I can't take it because I've committed myself here. So when we look at Chuck Woolery and dating, the odds on somebody else coming along and saying, hey, we'd like to talk to you about dating was pretty significant. The odds of somebody coming along to Chuck Woolery and say, we'd like you to do an ad for a car, not so significant. So a Talent might take one job for $100,000 because he looks and says, I'm not working this month. I don't have anything going on. I've got the time and the odds on anybody chasing me down to do this product in the near future are nil. Versus I'm a race car driver and somebody came to me and wants me to do something in the automotive world, I'm gonna hold out for bigger money because somebody else could come to me and want my endorsement because I'm a famous race car driver.

Yeah, but it makes good sense for celebrities to do that, obviously.

Absolutely.

But it also makes good sense for brands to take somebody that again, that's transferring credibility of the celebrity's brand. Chuck's a good example. Transferring his credibility around dating to the dating brand. And it was successful.

So a couple of other things I want to let people know about celebrities. When we're dealing with celebrities, most of these people are in SAG Aftra, which means whatever we're offering them, you can figure there's another 16 to 19% in SAG AFTRA union fees that are going to go on top of that fee. Travel can sometimes be a consideration and where you shoot is a consideration because sometimes you get involved with other union talent or other union crew because they happen to be in the union.

Yeah, I mean, we're running into that now with a project we're working on where we're having to jump through a lot of hoops because of the status of the celebrities we're working with. And it's just. It's just the nature of the business most often. That's one reason. That's a good reason why you just. Sometimes it's better to find a really good, solid, non union leading person. If you Will that, you know, they won't give you some of the instant credibility. They won't give you, you know, the transference of those feelings. You're not going to look at some regular old person on a commercial necessarily and say, hey, that's so. And so I want to be them like you would with a celebrity. But that's about weighing out the value, the cost of the celebrity and the value they bring to the brand.

So I want to go back to something you said real quick, and I think this is really good advice, what.

You made to people.

Unless I have some product or service that is just so obviously tied to a celebrity, I think the better plan is what you said, which is, first off, sit down and do the creative and figure out, can I build a solid ad campaign for this product without a celebrity? And now look and say, okay, by how much would this ad campaign be enhanced if I added the celebrity? And does that enhancement warrant the amount of money that that celebrity is going to cost?

And it's not. You know, there's obviously no guarantee. You might spend a lot of money on somebody and then they end up in jail. You still pay them, you know, you still invest in it.

You still paid them.

But there's risk and there's nothing. There's no guarantee that it's going to pan out there that way. There's not an equation for it. It's just about making sure you feel good about. I mean, to me, it's a lot of gut feeling where it's just knowing that you can use the celebrity to the best of yours and their ability to get the most out of them. And to me, if you can't. If you can't say that you feel good about it or that you need them or that, then to me, that makes you take a step back and rethink the creative, rethink the approach.

There's so much risk involved. You look at Colin Kaepernick. So Nike went and did a deal with him and did their ad campaign, which was pretty bold on their part, but now their celebrity talent turned on them.

There's risk.

I mean, think about that. The guy's under contract and all of a sudden he now attacks you because he says you're a racist. Your own talent is now calling your company a racist company.

Yeah, I mean, that's why it's really good to be very, very careful. Vet your talent. If your. If your goal is to pick somebody who is a lightning rod, you're increasing the amount of risk. Granted, they probably got a lot of mileage out of them early on, but it's coming back to bite them.

I think that's the whole thing. If you're. If you're going to pick somebody that's that hot.

Yeah, you're.

You need to be prepared to be that close to a flame.

Yeah, it's. It's risky. I mean, it's. God, there's another one. I was just thinking of that. Oh, actually, different story and different thing to consider when you do have talent picked out. And we're. And we're running into this currently. We ran into it last year, two years ago with another client who had a celebrity who was known for a thing. And I won't get into specifics, but when they're known for a thing, you want to capitalize on it. You want to put them in a scenario where viewers say, oh, if they don't recognize them, but they'll at least recognize the character potentially. And they say, oh, there's that guy who does that thing, that woman who does that thing. And you immediately get that. It adds to the fame factor. And I think you probably know who I'm talking about. He was a character on a show, Right.

Well, there's two cases that you and I have done in the past couple years. One was where we took somebody known for fitness and we created a fitness center to put them in their organic space. The other one was somebody who played a character on a sitcom and we put them in their organic space.

We did that. But it was also very restricted because the character was owned by somebody else. We're dealing with somebody else now where we're trying to play on the character's fame. And there are so many restrictions around that. So, again, when you're. That comes down to negotiating properly, I think, and making sure that the parameters with the talent are set. So if you want this person because they're known for this thing, don't always expect them to be able to do that thing. I'm trying to be. Trying to be intentionally vague because it's sensitive ground that we're treading on currently. But it's also, you know, John Walsh owns his image and is very adamant about being the security guy and letting people use him for the security side of it. Some of these other talents are just not keen to play their character or they can't.

Some of them don't like it.

Some of them don't like it.

I will tell you, in the case of Chuck, Chuck gets tired of everybody wanting to tie him to Love Connection. Could see that it Just gets old for. Yeah, he's like, I stopped doing that in 91.

Yeah.

I'll tell you, another. Another guy that I know who gets typecast all the time. Jamie Farr.

Yeah.

And Jamie's done probably 50 movies, different TV movies, since he left MASH. But what does everybody want to do? Everybody wants to put him in a dress.

I mean, I do, but just for fun.

But seriously, everybody, you know, he gets calls to do an endorsement deal, and they want to stick him in a. In a big hat and a dress.

I mean, that's probably the thing that actors are most afraid of in their career, is getting typecast, because it just fences them in in a way that limits their growth as artists, quote, unquote. Not that they're not artists, but, you know, it pens them in and it limits what they can do ultimately.

There was one exception to that, and he's gone now. But the exception was Adam West.

I thought you meant Jamie Farr with a dress.

No, Adam West. Adam loved being Batman, and he never minded if anybody wanted to tie him to Batman. He was always excited to do that.

I mean, it's Batman. Who wouldn't want to just be Batman Forever?

He was actually upset when they brought back the Batman movie series and didn't cast him in it. A very old Batman.

Yeah.

Bat Grandpa.

Bat Grandpa.

But he was actually bummed out about that. But Adam had no problem. He just. He owned it. He just, this is who I am. I'm Batman. And if you gotta be somebody, why not be Batman?

You know, if you're gonna be somebody for the rest of your career, I wouldn't mind being Batman.

Till George Clooney took the role and completely killed the franchise.

No, he was the worst Batman ever. I'm not gonna disagree with that. But the franchise didn't die. No.

They had to restart it.

Ben Affleck, same deal. Sorry.

Clooney sucked his Batman, though.

Clooney was not good.

No, actually, Michael Keaton, of all people, was a better Batman than George Clooney.

Yeah, that's a weird, isn't it?

Because, you know, Michael Keaton's not a, you know, leading man, handsome kind of guy, but he was a better Batman.

They nailed it.

He got that voice down, too.

He knew how to do that.

Well, folks, I think that pretty much wraps it up. Anything you think we're missing on the celebrity stuff, Rob?

No, I just wanna. Yeah, I was gonna say the word of the day is foppish. Look it up.

How is that tied to Batman? Did Batman use that Word a lot.

He's a little bit of a foppish dresser at one point.

All right, folks, that's that. By the way, last thing I'm going to tell you and Rob touched on this. If you decide you want to get a celebrity for your campaign, don't try.

To hire a celebrity yourself because you.

Will pay too much. You need to hire someone who knows how to hire celebrities, knows who the players are, knows how to negotiate, knows what they're worth, and as Rob said, knows how to be the bad cop so that when all the negotiations are done, the celebrity still has a good relationship with the company because you now have plausible deniability. It's like, well, I don't know. We didn't do the negotiations. Our agency did the negotiations. They're really tough people over there. I don't know what they negotiated. I'm just here to shoot a new commercial with you.

Exactly.

Because you want to have a good relationship with your celebrity.

Yeah. I mean, the agency does, too. I think it's one of those things where it can be done tactfully. These people do it every day. Agencies do it every day. And making sure that both sides come out ahead and feeling good about the deal at the end of the day is what's going to be, what's going to help get the most out of the talent for you.

And keep in mind, your agency is negotiating with an agent for the agency and for the. For the talent agency and for the advertising agency. This is an unemotional event. This is not a personal event.

It's a business deal.

We both know how to do this. All parties do it all the time. The agency's job is to hire the talent for the least amount of money.

The agent's job is to sell the talent for the most amount of money. The both parties know that.

Both parties go into it with their eyes open, and they both try to come to a deal on the case of the client. The client can sometimes be very emotionally tied to a celebrity and a celebrity. Some celebrities can even get emotional about how I'm being treated or how I'm being respected or I'm being valued. That's why you're better off to let two agencies resolve the issues. Because ultimately the talent agent on the other end is going to play tough with your agency, but then they're going.

To go back to the celebrity and sell the celebrity. Understand the agency. Even though the agent, even though he's being tough with you, he's selling the talent. Because until he sells the talent on taking the job, he doesn't get any money.

Right.

So he wants to do the deal. He wants to get his 10% of whatever that money is and he wants to be a hero to his talent. Because the agents who keep getting renewals from their talent are the agents who keep finding them more work all the time. So the agent has a big incentive in trying to make it happen.

Yeah, agreed. So lessons learned. Let somebody else do your dirty work. Don't get too tied to a talent. We've seen that happen. No. And then they come back with way too much money. And then you either have to walk or brainwash yourselves out of using that talent because sometimes you're too committed. And make sure it makes sense financially. Make sure you can't use the money elsewhere. And don't just think of it in terms of advertising because there is a PR play potentially. If you have those resources, think in those terms. Can you use the money better elsewhere? And do you need a celebrity to begin with? If the answer is yes, that's when you let your agency do their job. All right, folks.

Well, that's it today for CPG Insiders.

If you have any questions for anybody on the show, you can always reach out to us through the website. And you're always welcome to talk to any of the experts at Jekyll and Hyde Advertising, which you can get to at jekyll and hydeagency.com or you can get to it through cpginsiders.com so feel free to reach out to us if you have any emails. Actually, if you ever want to talk about celebrities, we're happy to talk about celebrities and give you some rough ideas of what they're worth.

And by the way, there's a lot.

Of great celebrities out there that are not as expensive as people think they are.

Yeah, some of them are shockingly affordable. You only find out if you ask though. If it's just, you know, I want to work in this tier, I'm thinking about a celebrity. I think that's when you start having those conversations.

You and I have hired some great name celebrities in the 25 to $75,000 bracket. Many times people who you wouldn't think you could get for that amount of money. So they are more affordable than you think. That's it for today. We'll see you on the next episode of CPG Insiders.

Thanks, everybody.

If you're looking to greatly increase sales on your CPG product, don't hesitate to contact us at Jekyll and Hyde Advertising and marketing. By the way, the only advertising agency with a guaranteed result. Just go to jekyllheidagency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800-542 10.