Partnering with celebrities is a popular marketing strategy. Famous faces garner attention (multiplying the impact of your media spend), and have the power to align your brand with desirable associations (increasing the effectiveness of campaign messaging).
But celebrity partnerships are not guaranteed success. For one, they are expensive, which raises the bar for the success of the campaign. Two, the wrong choice could impart the wrong associations on your brand. But going too safe is a risk in itself. The Business of Fashion recently reported that beauty brands are relying too much on the same celebrities. If you’re one of four beauty brands using the same face, will anyone remember your brand?
Source: Business of Fashion
Finally, the popularity of using celebrities makes it tough to stand out, even with a big name.

“Almost every day I get an email that there is a brand with a new brand ambassador.” —Imran Amed, founder, CEO, The Business of Fashion, at BoF Professional Summit 2024

Nevertheless, the right partner can elevate a brand to new heights. Earlier this year, Calvin Klein debuted a new campaign featuring The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White in a pair of CK boxer briefs. The campaign went viral, generating $12.8M in media spending 48 hours. According to Business of Fashion and LaunchMetrics, this was more than 4X the performance of Bottega Veneta’s campaign featuring A$AP Rocky and Kendall Jenner:

“In just 48 hours, the White ads generated $12.7 million in media impact value…For comparison, Bottega Veneta’s Pre-Spring 2024 campaign featuring paparazzi shots of Kendall Jenner and A$AP Rocky generated $2.8 million in 48 hours.”
— The Business of Fashion

What made the Jeremy Allen White campaign such a success?

BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed interviewed Calvin Klein’s CMO Jonathan Bottomley at the BoF Professional Summit to understand the strategy behind the viral video. As they entered the stage, I heard murmurs about the CK campaign from the audience: “It’s literally just [Jeremy] walking in underwear.” The audience member isn’t wrong. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t significant strategy that helped propel the work.

Jeremy Allen White x Calvin Klein. Source: Calvin Klein

A framework for celebrity partnerships

When I help clients select celebrity ambassadors, we will create a custom rubric with all of the desired associations, campaign parameters, and other qualifications to score talent and narrow a shortlist down to the final pick. Filling it out as a team gets everyone from creative teams to finance on board with the decision. Rubrics can be complex, but there are (3) general filters that a celebrity partnership should align to. And from Jeremy’s conversation with BoF, Calvin Klein nailed all three.
3 Filters to select a campaign ambassador. Source: Michelle Wiles

1. Brand message

Your chosen celebrity should align to what you want to convey as a brand or product. Obvious, no? But brand positioning is easy to forget when the opportunity to sign the current ‘it’ celeb appears on your desk. What is your overall marketing message? What are the associations of your potential celebrity ambassador? Is there overlap? Can you create overlap with the campaign?
A brand like Nike is going to source boundary breaking athletes to reinforce Nike’s positioning as the brand that inspires every athlete.
What does Calvin Klein want to convey? Per Bottomley, Calvin Klein has always been about “timeless values of confidence, empowerment and sexuality.” Jeremy Allen White’s breakout role as award-winning chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto in The Bear fit the bill. According to the NYTimes, White’s character is known for “the way he looks in the show as much as his performance — specifically, the bicep-hugging white shirt that acts as his uniform.”
Of course, there are many confident and sexy celebrities. What else made Jeremy a good pick?

2. Authentic Brand Connection

Partnering with talent who already uses your product helps develop a campaign that feels less like a sales pitch and more like a partnership between brand and one of its customers. It also helps you get more organic media, as partners are more likely to share outside of the contracted deliverables and contribute to creative direction.
Bottomley noted this as another filter for Calvin Klein’s endorsement strategy:

Jeremy was very often appearing in Calvins. We picked up on that.
- Jonathan Bottomley, BoF Professional Summit 2024

If your ideal talent does not yet use your product, you can still build this into your strategy. Give them your product to use for a month before closing the deal. Let them build a relationship with your brand, and then co-create the campaign together.

3. Media Strategy

This is the least obvious filter but potentially the most important to taking a celebrity partnership from standard to stand out. By media strategy, I mean: How will this talent partner help us gain more than our fair share of attention?
Selecting a partner right before they go on tour or star in a film can amplify your campaign:

You want to partner with someone who is going to be talked about — ideally not by other brands — but because they are on a popular TV show or finishing a project.
— Jonathan Bottomley, BoF Professional Summit 2024

Calvin Klein partnered with Jeremy Allen White just as his star was rising with the second season of Hulu series The Bear and 2023 feature film The Iron Claw. Calvin Klein then dropped the campaign right before White attended the Golden Globes (clad in Calvin Klein, of course) which helped amplify the impact of the video.
But you can also get creative with media strategy.
For example, when Old Spice launched its famous “The man your man could smell like” ad campaign, they selected former football player Isaiah Mustafa.

Old Spice: The man your man could smell like. Source: YouTube
Mustafa is fit and charismatic — perfect for a campaign aimed at selling men’s body wash to women. But on the media strategy side, Old Spice launched the campaign online right before the Super Bowl. Old Spice did not purchase a Super Bowl spot. Instead — they purchased ‘superbowl ad campaign’ search terms to take advantage of the surge in interest in ads before and after the big game — which drove clicks to their video. Isaiah’s association with the NFL reinforced this strategy, while a TV media buy after Super Bowl weekend caused many people to remember the ad as a Super Bowl campaign. Mustafa’s smooth performance took care of the rest.
Even today, Old Spice’s ‘the man your man could smell like’ is associated with the Super Bowl. Source: Google

Calvin Klein had a similar challenge: How can we link our media and talent strategy to increase our chances of media coverage and going viral?
Part of Calvin Klein’s strategy was selecting a celebrity with current active projects. But there is a second part of the strategy. Calvin Klein specifically appeals to the interest of its ideal target — fashion insiders — by selecting talent that isn’t mainstream …yet. They know that fashion insiders want to talk about who’s coming up, not who is already everywhere:

Find [talent] that have a cultural velocity that are traveling fast, moving quickly through culture, on the cusp of breaking through. What you see in those cultural phenomena is people who will talk about it first. Those are the people who will see it, spot it, share it first. — Jonathan Bottomley, BoF Professional Summit 2024

Selecting a rising star in Jeremy Allen White helped Calvin Klein drive shares among in the know individuals, and super charge the campaign among the fashion community they are marketing to. It’s the same reason Calvin Klein selected Justin Bieber in 2015. A major celebrity, yes, but a celebrity going through a transition from immature teen heartthrob to respected artist made him someone to talk about.

Jeremy Allen White checked all the celebrity campaign boxes.

A final note: don’t just hire a celebrity. Create a story.

When creating brand strategy frameworks, it’s important to look at the counterfactual. Jeremy Allen White’s campaign went viral. But not every Calvin Klein campaign does. CK also did a campaign with Euphoria and Saltburn star Jacob Elordi. The campaign is even set to the same music as the Jeremy Allen White campaign.

Jacob Elordi for Calvin Klein. Source: YouTube
Why didn’t the Jacob Elordi’s ads go viral? He was active in a popular show and film. He conveys the sexy appeal of Calvin Klein’s brand.
Simple: the campaign wasn’t interesting enough:

[Elordi] was too pristine. White is shot like statuary, but his vibe is always louche. On his billboard, he lies on his stomach, jeans down — a callback to [Calvin Klein’s] Kate Moss infamous Obsession perfume ad from the 1990s, in which she lies nude on a dark couch. This is a difficult move for a man to pull off, especially one who wants to be taken seriously. We expect to see women posed like this in fashion spreads, no matter how alarmingly vulnerable it may make them seem. But a man in this position still risks ridiculousness.
— NYTimes

NYTimes refers to the Jeremy Allen White campaign as louche, unexpected, and risking ridiculousness. In other words: it’s brave. Different. The video itself — White stripping down in public, with the heat of NYC, and his shockingly fit physique — all build intrigue during the spot. Old Spice’s campaign entertains through humor and perfectly delivered lines while the set changes seamlessly around Isaiah Mustafa.
Celebrity campaigns are everywhere. Great ones manage to align brand message to celebrity and media strategy — and then deliver a narrative that commands attention by delivering a show on par with the high-production TV and movies we associate them with. In other words — selecting the celebrity partner is just step one.

What did you think of the Jeremy Allen White campaign?

Want to talk celebrity partnerships, or work on campaign ideas that can stand out? Contact me via my agency Embedded.
Not sure where to start? Many clients opt for ad-hoc coaching — hourly consultations on any aspect of your marketing and creative strategy. Get in touch here, or book a 15 minute free consultation.

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