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.
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.
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.
This deliberately eaves 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.)
Branding Deals for Celebrities
JEFF STRAUGHN rocks back and forth in his office chair, chugging coffee as he describes the challenge he faced three years ago when he left a Madison Avenue ad agency to join the Island Def Jam record label with a new mandate: carve out branding deals with corporations that will raise the visibility of Island Def Jam artists.
Among his first assignments: a young vocalist who had been signed to the label by Jay-Z, then Def Jam’s chief executive, and whose first album was about to be released: Rihanna.
“Here was a girl that no one was quite sure how to pronounce her name and quite a few people didn’t know where Barbados was,” he says. “But we knew we had a pop superstar here.”
What better way to drum up interest in Rihanna among teenagers than a shopping mall tour? As luck would have it, the Secret brand of Procter & Gamble was looking to introduce a new body spray and wanted to align the campaign with an emerging singer.
Secret ended up sponsoring a 12-city mall tour for Rihanna, financing various production costs and creating a MySpace site where fans could get tickets for the shows.
While her first concert attracted about 250 people, Rihanna was drawing crowds of 2,500 when the tour closed. A star — and a pitchwoman — were being born.
Mr. Straughn and Rihanna’s managers, meanwhile, actively negotiated other deals, including one with the Barbados Tourism Authority, which used portions of a video for one of Rihanna’s early songs in television ads.
Eight months after her debut album, Rihanna released a second album, whose hit song “S.O.S.” prompted a deal with Nike. Rihanna shot a separate music video for the song, singing and dancing in a high school gym in a new line of Nike fitness dance clothes.
She also did deals with J. C. Penney and Nokia, then with a juice and tea company, Fuze. Rihanna featured Fuze drinks in one of her videos, and the company put six-foot-tall displays of the singer in grocery stores.
While Rihanna was paid for some of her work, the endorsements were intended to raise her visibility, push her music — and her brand — in new ways to consumers, and perhaps save the record label some marketing expenses.
BY the time Rihanna was on the verge of releasing her third album, “Good Girl Gone Bad,” the offers for endorsement and licensing deals were flying in, Mr. Straughn says. Not all were good fits for the singer, who was trying to reach an older audience with the album.
“We said no to so many deals,” says Marc Jordan, one of her managers. “Either the fit wasn’t right — it was more about a check than extending Rihanna’s brand — or there was a disconnect between the brand and Rihanna.”
Despite the desire to reduce marketing costs, Mr. Straughn says he can’t push Rihanna or any of Def Jam’s other artists into doing endorsement deals they don’t want to do. He notes that many artists, like the Killers, don’t want to take part in any endorsement deals.
For her part, Rihanna has been a branding machine — though she says that she has grown more wary of overexposure.
“We started out trying to get everything we could and now we have to be a little more selective,” she says. “We have to hold back a little bit. It’s a good thing to have to say we can take things back a little bit.”
Last spring, she completed her deal with Totes, which was her first licensing arrangement. Meanwhile, CoverGirl, which planned a print ad and related campaigns for the singer and its Wetslicks lip gloss, was persuaded by Rihanna’s representatives to do a commercial as well.
CoverGirl executives saw a chance to connect their new product seamlessly to a megahit song.
“I knew in my gut that this was going to be a hit,” says Vince Hudson, marketing director for CoverGirl North America.
“Def Jam needed to have promotion of her album, and CoverGirl wanted the product to be associated with the hot song. It was a win-win.”
As part of the promotion, CoverGirl allowed consumers to download the “Umbrella” video on its Web site and put displays in stores near its Fruit Spritzers product that allowed consumers to push a button to hear the song.
Mr. Straughn says Rihanna provides a good example of how the recording business is changing and how artists and brands can successfully wed without either feeling as if they’ve lost themselves. Rihanna, he crows, “is my single biggest success story.”
Earlier this year, P.& G. provided a glimpse into what the future of celebrity-branded advertising may look like: it’s creating a joint-venture record label with Island Def Jam.
The venture, called Tag Records, is headed up by the record producer and rapper Jermaine Dupri and will sign on new artists who, along with Mr. Dupri, will be the faces of P.& G.’s Tag body spray lines. (Aspiring artists hoping to get noticed will be able to upload their music to the Tag Web site, P.& G. says.)
“Our plan is to fully integrate and merge the music and the marketing for the new Tag body sprays that we have out there,” says Adam Weber, P.& G.’s brand manager for Tag.
“This is different than the typical endorsement deal that has a start and end date. This is going to be ongoing throughout their entire career. The message becomes one and the same at some point between Tag and the artist.”
So are there any limits to what celebrities can endorse, or how far the celebrity pitch could go? Mr. Stoute briefly considers the question before jumping up and grabbing a framed front page from a newspaper.
“See that?” he asks, pointing to the picture in the center of the page, showing a General Motors S.U.V. in a metallic blue concept color that Jay-Z helped to design.
“That’s Jay-Z blue! We invented a color! There are no limits. There is no such thing as too far.”
