Stars For Sale

Talk, Nov, 2001 by Sam Sifton

"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.