We’ve all heard about actors who started doing commercials so they could work in entertainment. Brad Pitt once shilled for Pringles and now has two Oscars.
But what about the stars who dream of working not just for, but in the ad industry? Spike Lee, Michael B. Jordan, Ryan Reynolds, Shaquille O’Neal, Armando Pérez (AKA Pitbull), and Kristen Bell are among the celebrities who have tied their names to advertising agencies and studios.
“I’m not shocked by it, and I expect to see a lot more of it,” Asmirh Davis, founding partner and CSO at marketing agency Majority, which Shaq helped start last year, told Marketing Brew. “I think we’ll probably see more agencies that are having celebrities involved behind the scenes, even more so than them being the face of the agency.”
The reason, it seems, is that it’s often a win-win for both the celebrity and the agency.
The agency appeal
Davis said Majority founder Omid Farhang and Shaq bonded over their experiences on campaign shoots. “They were the only people who looked [like] anything other than a white man oftentimes, and it was like, ‘Wait a minute, we’re supposed to be creating ads and spots that are supposed to be targeted to the world. That’s not how the world looks.”
So Majority was created with the idea of flipping the norms in the predominantly-white marketing industry with a majority-minority agency, Shaq told the Wall Street Journal. Davis said Shaq’s “signing on was really the rocket fuel that made us take off into a new stratosphere,” noting that she’s not sure the paper would have covered the agency last year without him.
Jeff Jenkins, EVP of global marketing at Carter’s, which owns OshKosh B’gosh, said reading about Shaq’s new agency was the hook to working together on the brand’s “Today is Someday” campaign, but not the only reason for pursuing it. “The Shaquille O’Neal piece is interesting, and probably got [Majority] on my radar because of the articles that were written about them,” he said. “But ultimately, we wouldn’t have chosen them if their work and the quality of people wasn’t amazing.”
Even though Shaq was not formally involved in the OshKosh B’gosh campaign, his connections came in handy when Majority needed to contact Muhammad Ali’s estate for an ad where an actor plays him as a child. “That was just a phone call, as opposed to other agencies, it might have been a week of ping-ponging between contacts with emails and whatnot,” Davis said.
Davis, who has more than 20 years of experience in advertising, said the agility and speed provided by Shaq’s involvement has contributed to the agency’s growth. Majority now has 16 employees and has worked with more than 20 clients, ranging from the NBA G League to Coca-Cola to Netflix, and has doubled its revenue from a year ago.
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But Davis also credits the agency’s quality of work, as well as its focus on diversity, for its success. “That’s actually a much more compelling selling proposition to advertisers than the potential to have access to Shaquille O’Neal,” she said.
The celebrity appeal
The world of advertising is not foreign to celebrities—just look at how many were in Super Bowl commercials this year. It’s no wonder that, beyond starring in them, they’d want to get involved in an industry that’s projected to hit a trillion-dollar valuation in the next few years.
According to Davis, it’s become easier for celebrities to do so in part because of social media. “The way that consumers view advertising and marketing is changing and it’s looking a lot more like entertainment and content creation, which celebrities are much more familiar with than they are traditional marketing,” she explained.
Like when Ryan Reynolds’s agency, Maximum Effort, turned the “Peloton Wife” meme into a spoof ad for the actor’s gin brand in a week’s time.
For celebrities, there’s also the added benefit of having an agency at their disposal for all the brands they—very relatably—own. Maximum Effort lists Reynolds’ brands, Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile, as well as movies he starred in, like Deadpool and Detective Pikachu, on its website. Kristen Bell’s Dunshire Productions lists Hello Bello, the diaper brand started by her and her husband.
Roberto Alcazar, EVP and executive creative director of 305 Worldwide, which started in 2019, said he thought Pitbull “needed a headquarters of all his entrepreneurial projects” when co-founding the creative agency. To date, it has done work for NASCAR’s Trackhouse Racing team, which the artist co-owns, in addition to other projects with brands like GoGo squeeZ and Corona.
For 305, Alcazar said having Pitbull as co-founder and chief creative officer has been key to keeping the agency relevant and being “culture-first,” calling him one of its “secret sauces.”
Clients also seem to get Cameo-like access to Mr. Worldwide. When asked if they get to meet him, Alcazar said, “They may get a surprise video once in a while.”