Today, it’s no longer embarrassing to take money from a brand. “You see the biggest names doing endorsement deals and the sigma isn’t there,” Ippolito said.
How’d things change? For starters, the web made it impossible to hide anything. And the creation of influencers meant that more traditional stars suddenly had competition for endorsement gigs.
“A lot of celebrities were saying, ‘wait a minute, I can do a one-day TV shoot and maybe half a day for print and I’m going to get $500,000? A million dollars?’” Shabelman said. “They realized that the payday for the workload was really great.”
3. One endorsement now lives on many channels
A generation ago, an endorsement deal “was TV, print, radio—that was it,” Ippolito said. Today it’s those three media, plus TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and more. “We’re not going to do one 30-second [ad], pay someone millions of dollars and that’s it,” Shabelman said.
Filling manifold platforms with celebrity content often means the brand or its agency adapting the creative work it shot to suit the individual outlets. But increasingly, celebrities are doing that work themselves. A single social media post from Kim Kardashian will set a brand back nearly $2.2 million, according to 2024 data from Influencer Marketing Hub. Obviously, an influencer will cost far less.
While a brand surrenders a degree of autonomy by letting a star create her own endorsement messages, it’s also getting authentic content it couldn’t have made on its own. “A lot of these influencers [will] take your brief, create the content, and give it back to the client [brand],” Ippolito said.
4. The celeb had better fit the brand
For most of advertising history, it was anyone’s guess if the stars in the ads used—or even liked—the products they were posing with. Did Zsa Zsa Gabo actually have Smirnoff vodka in her liquor cabinet at home? Did Dean Martin really run around airports in search of a Bell System payphone? Probably not.
Today, some of that disconnect still exists—especially in categories like snack foods. “It’s understood that you don’t need the belief that [the celebrity] is actually using that product,” Ippolito said.
But in most cases, a credible link between star and brand is essential. When TrimSpa endorser Anna Nicole Smith was found dead in 2007, TMZ ran photos of her refrigerator shelf backed with archrival SlimFast. No brand wants that sort of problem.
Which is why a celebrity’s regular use of a product (at least in public) is often contractually stipulated. “Organic and authentic are the most commonly used words in briefs right now,” Shabelman said.
5. Brands may not know what’s good for them
Back when professional athletes were the only celebs who’d do ads, it was comparatively simple for a brand like Rolaids to pick out Dodgers’ manager Tommy LaSorta or Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach—both men appeared in an ad that Burns Entertainment founder David Burns put together in 1983.
Over time, however, celebrities have been getting younger. Harvard University research shows that most famous people become famous before age 30. So a CEO or CMO may not have even heard of the star who could be a good fit as an endorser.
