The Celebrity Endorsement Playbook: 6 Deals That Tested the Line Between Cash and Credibility
Celebrity Intelligence was built around the premise of bringing my experience from 30 years of celebrity journalism to stories and providing an insight into how Hollywood and the business of celebrity really works.
As Advertising Week wraps up in New York, Celebrity Intelligence has investigated the celebrity brand deals that made the most noise over the past year, and what they reveal about the real business of fame.
Celebrities get a bad rap for being vacuous sellouts. In my experience, after nearly 30 years covering Hollywood, that isn’t true for most. The stars I’ve spent a career getting close to are generally bright, curious, and driven by something beyond the paycheck. But as the entertainment industry has made it harder to simply make money from the work itself, stars have leaned further into commercial territory. And that’s where the wheels start coming off.
Tommy Lee Jones for Suntory Boss Coffee, Leonardo Dicaprio for Orico Credit Cards, Arnold Schwarzenegger for Takeda Alinamin V Energy Drink
There’s a reason this used to be done quietly. Before the internet, Hollywood had an unspoken arrangement: you could take the questionable check, but only somewhere nobody at home would see it. Japan was the destination of choice, its advertising budgets far more extravagant than American ones with a much lower risk of publicity at home. Tommy Lee Jones spent 13 years as the face of Suntory Boss canned coffee, Leonardo DiCaprio fought the Japanese mafia in ads for credit card company Orico, and Arnold Schwarzenegger secured an actual secrecy clause preventing advertisers from disclosing his deals back home. Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt and Nicolas Cage cashed similar checks, for beer, a phone carrier and a Pachinko parlor. The arrangement was so ingrained it inspired the plot of Lost in Translation, loosely based on Francis Ford Coppola’s own Suntory ad shoot.
