The ad is for a financial brokerage house.
The illustration is a color photo of the actor Sam Waterston — a head and shoulders mug shot — looking at the camera.
The actor's name is never mentioned in the text of the ad. So why use his photo? What's the relationship? Oh, the ad is for TD Waterhouse and the company's name shares the first five letters of Waterston's name, so you see the logic, don't you?
No.
Instead of Waterston, they could have used a picture of an outhouse. After all, matching the last five letters is just as valid as matching the first five, and they wouldn't have had to pay any talent fee.
Remember Suzy Chaffee, who became Suzy Chapstik? If her last name has been Fong, she never could have had her 15 minutes of fame. Here we have former football player Dan Marino. He's on TV hawking cars for a dealer named Maroone. Marino…Maroone. Get it?
There seems to be a cult out there in Adland that's worshiping celebrity endorsements instead of marketing. I have no information about how many millions of dollars they're wasting every day, week, month and year, but I feel reasonably safe suggesting that getting attention is just the first step of a sales argument, not the purpose. Serena Williams just signed a $55 million dollar deal with Nike. Hey, guys, I play tennis too, and I'd settle for $55,000 (plus a restringing job).
Heck, go online and you'll find cynicism anthropomorphized — lots and lots of celebrity vendors. A company named Brooks International tells us we can have Erin Brockovich. Let's see…is there a company with a name like “Son-of” she can pitch? In fact, how about a triple — the Brockovich pitch for Son-of. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
The Nashville Agency says we can get an Olympic back-bench skier named Hannah Hardaway. I guess we have to take their word that she's an Olympic athlete. Her bio says she came in sixth at Salt Lake City in 2002. That's better than the Salt Lake City organizers did, but her name is perfect. Imagine “Hardaway” for some of those exotic bedroom aids flooding the spam channels.
Kirstie Alley, who seems to look stranger every time, is the paid endorser for Pier One. My suggested slogan: “Furniture for your Alley.” What should we charge as a creative fee?
Jackie Chan was the celebrity endorser for Hanes T-shirts. I don't know if he still is, but the slogan stares us in the face: “Change your shirt if you chan, Sweatball.”
Then we have Queen Latifah for Pizza Hut. What a natural: “Latifah's Lot-of-fat.”
If Clairol had the guts, they'd switch Jane Seymour's endorsement of Loving Care hair color to “Seymour hair.” Betcha they won't. Think of the word of mouth they're missing.
Slightly more racy are the possibilities of full-time career celebrity Paris Hilton. Imagine, especially after all that Internet “exposure,” the supreme logic of “Paris in the springs.”
Enough fun. Let's get serious. We all know Daniel J. Boorstin's classic truism: “A celebrity is someone who is well-known for his well-knownness.” Too many advertising agencies have their own truism: “A celebrity is our crutch when we don't have a valid marketing concept.”
So I'm pleased that the direct mail campaign from Web provider WebEx, featuring that unpleasant, sniggering character “Ernestine” (Lily Tomlin), didn't bring as much response as a straightforward offer.
And we have Kobe Bryant. Legal problems aside, Kobe Bryant's intellect isn't about to give us a creative thought paralleling Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. But aghast, for commercial reasons, are Nike, McDonald's (yeah, Kobe, you deserve a break today), Sprite, Spalding, and Upper Deck trading cards. Net to Kobe: About $22 million per year. Adidas, the pre-Nike sponsor, recently replaced him with somebody named Kevin Garnett, for $45 million.
Celebrities gain attention. But can they sell? Here is ex-football coach Don Shula, standing uncomfortably near, but not touching, an air conditioning unit. And for some insane reason the healthcare octopus Humana has made him their new spokesman, with the impossibly clichéd headline “As the NFL's winningest coach, I have the right game plan for you.” Yeah, right, Don: How about quarterbacking all those asterisks whose references are, “Limitations and co-payments apply”?
Level 3 Communications has Sean Connery's sibilant-“s” brogue as a voice-over. Missing from these hissing commercials: What does Level 3 do?
On to one of my favorite Ringling Brothers candidates, Christina Aguilera. I've just read a comment about her in a British newspaper (The London Times), and I have to share it:
“Does Christina Aguilera have hair? That's the big question. What is this stuff that she glues, or braids, or screws into her head? Is it old rags? Old rope? Whatever, it looks like it spent a couple of months on a garbage forecourt before she got her hands on it.”
The most annoying “celebrity” ploy of the season uses one of the most annoying celebrities — Mike Myers. “The Cat in the Hat” is banking paid endorsement dollars from sponsors ranging from Smucker's (rather apt) to the U.S. Postal Service. Your tax dollars at work! The lovely Dr. Seuss poem drawn and quartered!
But this has to be the masterpiece of artificial sensitivity: Electing Arnold Schwarzenegger in no way compares with this lunatic move in California: A Los Angeles county official has filed a discrimination complaint demanding that computer networks quit using “master” and “slave” to identify one computer controlling another.
See? We're not alone.
HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS is the principal of Lewis Enterprises in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He consults with and writes direct response copy for clients worldwide. Among his 27 books are a recently published new edition of “On the Art of Writing Copy,” “Marketing Mayhem” and “Effective E-mail Marketing.”
