Stars For Sale

Talk, Nov, 2001 by Sam Sifton

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.