Stars For Sale

A Madison Avenue giant is quietly buying up the firms that control access to Hollywood's biggest names. The plan? To turn celebrities into stealth billboards for everything from sunglasses to Snapple. First up: Tom Cruise.

HERE'S THE THING ABOUT Hollywood that bugs Mark Dowley. It could make him the guy to change the entertainment business forever: "Oscar night," Dowley says. "That's the one that drives me crazy."

Look at the parade of fashionable starlets on the red carpet in front of nearly a billion covetous consumers, he says. "It's all, 'What are you wearing?' 'What are you wearing?' Okay, here's what they're wearing: Prada, Ralph Lauren, Badgley Mishka, Chanel, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, boom, boom, boom."

Dowley ticks off the labels on his fingertips, mock angry. "This sells clothes. It spawns knockoffs. The Oscars are worth billions and billions of dollars just to the fashion industry alone," he says. "And what does the actress get in return? A free dress?

"It's wrong," Dowley says, impatiently. "It's the wrong economic equation."

Mark Dowley might be the only person alive who, when he looks at an actress at the Academy Awards, sees a helpless victim of corporate greed. But then again, Dowley has made a career out of ensuring that any time a celebrity intersects with a product, the celebrity gets paid.

Dowley is 36, a big jocko suburban kid from Connecticut, the son of a Ford executive. Two years ago he was named a vice chairman of the advertising giant McCann-Erickson WorldGroup; since 1996 he's been chairman of its subsidiary Momentum Worldwide. Both companies dance at the crossroads of advertising, marketing, and public relations--Momentum to the tune of $1.4 billion in billings last year. a lot of it leveraged off the selling power of sports stars like Tiger Woods and star musicians like Sheryl Crow. Now Dowley wants to go one step further, bringing a formerly reluctant category of celebrity--movie stars--into the corporate fold.

After all, he points out, returning to his mercenary catechism, what is a free Oscar gown compared with the potential value that worldwide exposure brings to a designer? The equation, when Dowley connects the dots, is stunningly lopsided. Some 800 million people watch the Academy Awards. According to A.C. Nielsen, 63 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 49 watching TV that night tune into the ceremony. The cost of a single minute of Oscar ad time in 2000 was $2.4 million, And celebrities, as academy history demonstrates, have been stunningly effective sales tools. After Sharon Stone wore a Gap mock turtleneck to the Oscars in 1996, the Gap completely sold out of the garment. Gwyneth Paltrow's 1999 Oscar appearance in a pink Ralph Lauren gown brought a whole demographic back to Ralph Lauren," Dowley says. "It was worth a fortune to them."

Dowley can't wait to start tapping that fortune. As traditional advertising loses its power in the face of both commercial-skipping services like TiVo and commercial-free, subscriber-based networks like HBO, the implied endorsement of commercially branded Hollywood stars should be worth, he says, "millions."

TO THAT END DOWLEY HAS DEVELoped the Medici Project, a business plan under which he will pair Hollywood's hottest stars with Madison Avenue's richest brands. If he's successful, anytime a willing actress wears a particular brand to the Oscars (or in her new movie), she will receive a fee--a large one--for her trouble.

Dowley has spent the past two years laying the groundwork for the Medici Project. He has, in essence, acquired entire stables of celebrities by arranging McCann-Erickson's purchase of two of the most powerful publicity firms in America: PMK and Huvane Baum Halls. Together these firms control access to more than 300 of Hollywood's most incandescent stars, among them Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Russell Crowe, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, Sharon Stone, and Cameron Diaz. McCann in turn is owned by communications conglomerate Interpublic Group, whose corporate clients include Microsoft, Coca-Cola, American Express, and General Motors.

If all goes according to plan, actors under Dowley's purview will sign lucrative pacts with consumer entities that are also Dowley's clients, in much the same way that sports stars have endorsement deals to sell everything from apparel to banking services.

Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner are already on board. "It's an exciting new concept in which the corporate world supports the creative community, producing a synergy of ideas and concepts that interact with each other," Wagner said in a written statement. The corporate brands by which she and Cruise will be "supported" will be announced this fall.

The Medici Project was quietly presented to the Interpublic board in early September. "Mark's the kind of guy who can get things done," says Interpublic CEO John Dooner. "Once you recognize that talents are brands, then a relationship between talents-as-brands and corporate America is almost common sense.

"It is," says Dowley, "a major, major paradigm shift." And he's right. With Hollywood's top-gun actor aboard, the battle is already half won.

UNTIL NOW, IT WAS RARE TO SEE A tent-pole star, the sort of talent that can make or break a film's prospects--Tom Ranks, say, or Julia Roberts--in an American advertisement for anything other than the movie the actor was promoting at the time. Tom Ranks hawking a long-distance service wouldn't be kosher, goes the thinking. Art should not be besmirched by consumerism.

Athletes, though, have had no such compunction. They have enriched themselves with commercial endorsements for years--Tiger Woods made $54 million last year from endorsements, dwarfing his $9 million in golf winnings. Few hold the shilling against them.

Mark Dowley has spent most of his career in the trenches of sports marketing. He's a sporty guy, basically. After graduating from the College of Wooster with a degree in economics (and a varsity letter in Division III lacrosse), Dowley joined ProServ, a sports marketing and management firm. He spent a lot of time patrolling tennis tournaments, making sure players wore their contractually mandated logos on the correct wrist and in the correct direction to facilitate advantageous photographs.

Thanks to these efforts, Dowley saw a few brands--Evian in particular--explode. Which got him to thinking: "Sports is a $35 billion-a-year industry in the U.S. Entertainment is $160 billion and reaches men and women better than sports. Yet it's socially acceptable to have direct commercial endorsements in sports, but not in entertainment? There has got to be a better way to do this."

That better way has a name. Around the Momentum shop in New York it is "experiential branding": improving a consumer's awareness of (and desire for) a particular brand by providing a positive experience with the brand itself. Or brands, plural.

Dowley has already put his theory into practice, with impressive results. During the launch of American Express's Blue card in 1999, Momentum brought Sheryl Crow to Central Park for a free concert sponsored by Amex. Blue cards were heavily pushed at the event, and subsequent sign-ups for the card, industry sources say, came in well above the company's expectations. Meanwhile Crow's artistic reputation remained relatively undefiled, despite the undisclosed fee she received from American Express; songs she recorded at the event received three Grammy nominations in 2000 and one statue, for Best Female Rock Vocal.

In 1999 Dowley struck a deal for Tom Cruise to wear Oakley sunglasses in Mission: Impossible 2. Dowley won't say how much Oakley shelled out for the screen time, but industry sources place it around $100,000. "You see Oakley sunglasses when Cruise is on top of the mountain," Dowley explains. "He puts the glasses on, and all the instructions for his mission come onto those sunglasses. It doesn't look like an Oakley ad. But in effect it Is."

The results were more than anyone expected. Oakley's sales were $100 million in the quarter following the release of the film, up 39 percent from the same quarter of the previous year.

The Oakley deal was a promising experiment. But whether the deployment of this sort of synergy throughout Hollywood will yield the same results remains to be seen. "One key difference between sports or music endorsements and the more subtle movie star version," warns one veteran Hollywood producer, "is that Tiger Woods's sportswear doesn't distract you from his golf game. Britney Spears's soda doesn't change the way you experience her concerts. If a movie star's favored products suddenly crop up in his films in ways that draw attention, the audience may well react negatively to being pulled out of the story they are watching so that the star can make a few extra bucks."

Though Dowley is experiential branding's most articulate and passionate advocate, a few others in the industry have been moving toward the same hoped-for payoff in slightly different ways. Advertising giants Young & Rubicam and Grey Worldwide recently joined up with the Los Angeles "brand introduction" firm Bedell/McLean to try to get theft brands featured roles in movies and TV shows. As a result Ford is paying production costs for the WB's new reality series No Boundaries in return for getting Ford SUVs on the show And product placement is not just limited to the big and small screens: Jewelry company Bulgari recently paid British author Fay Weldon an undisclosed sum to buy a prominent place in her new novel, Weldon more than complied. The book's title is The Bulgari Connection.

Dowley isn't interested in these one-off deals. One-off deals can fail. He says that corporate sponsors want the increased influence (and insurance) that comes with buying the cooperation of only the "20 or 40" biggest stars, who are powerful enough to exert creative control over their projects, thereby ensuring that the endorsement scenes don't get left on the cutting room floor "This doesn't work-and no slur intended-this doesn't work with John Cusack," Dowley explains. "It works for Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise or Martin Scorsese or Mike Nichols or, you know, Steven Soderbergh."

Once the Medici Project gets underway, Dowley says, stars and big directors like these will be paid a retainer by the advertisers in return for access to the marketing opportunities the celebrities' projects present. "The star can put the money in the production budget of his film, because he controls that, or in the marketing budget," Dowley says. "Or," he adds, "he can put it right into his bank account."

Dowley is filled with ideas about how to exploit the synergy between Hollywood and Wall Street. He sees actors and directors speaking about creativity to the stockholders of companies that sponsor them. He sees an actor's production company hipping a sponsor's marketing department to next summer's big promotional tie-in opportunities-anthropomorphic frogs, for instance. It's easy: Dowley gets the talent from his publicity firms, the business from McCann-Erickson and Momentum. The possibilities make him glow.

"There has never been a successful attempt to marry the expertise of Madison Avenue with the creativity and marketing ability of the people in the film business," says publicity doyenne Pat Kingsley, who owned half of PMK at the time of its sale to McCann and still heads the company. The Medici Project is "in its infancy, but I think Mark instinctively understands our business."

The terrible beauty of the Medici Project is that if it works-perhaps when it works would be the more accurate phrase-consumers may not realize that they are being drawn into a marketing effort, so seamless is the integration of ad and content. "What always stuns me," Dowley says, "is that people think there's a lot of serendipity in all this marketing. And if people think that, then we're doing a really great job. But there's no such thing as coincidence anymore." No, indeed. In the future, as Dowley sees it, all consumer impulses will be neatly orchestrated by a kind of Hollywood-industrial complex.

NOT EVERYONE IN HOLlywood or on Madison Avenue is excited about the prospect of A-list actors able to dictate product placements in their movies. "They're already telling you who the caterer's supposed to be. Who needs to hear them telling you that you've got to get Nike in?" says Michael Hausman, producer of such films as House of Games and The Firm. "For me, as a producer, any more power to the star having nothing to do with their performance would be a hindrance."

"What's depressing," says another producer, "is the inevitability of it-that once one big movie star cashes in and doesn't have his career derailed, chances are it will be a part of the business forever."

The studios can also be expected to resist these deals, but Dowley thinks that as long as he has the talent wrapped up, they'll be relatively powerless to stop him. That's why he wants to do it first.

"In my heart of hearts I think what I'm going to see is a lot of Jesus Christ, why didn't we think of this?'" he says. "Because what studio is going to turn down Tom Cruise to do a movie with them? You know? Unless he's found guilty of child molesting, he's got no problems.

SAM SIFTON is a founding editor and senior writer for Talk. His book A Field Guide to the Yettie provided a mischievous look at the universe of the dot-com geek at almost the very moment that universe imploded. On page 80 Sifton peers into the future of advertising in Hollywood; soon, he says, we may see Sharon Stone at the Oscars in a Fubu hat. "There's no escaping this," says Sifton. "In less than a year the film industry is just going to explode into a hot brand-on-brand lovefest."

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