Celebrity and Business

I had an amazing conversation with friends this morning while eating pancakes. Yes, I have friends. The general premise was that when starting a company today, you should partner with a celebrity in order to create free marketing and distribution. It was an interesting thought experiment raised because my friend and founder of a condiment company has partnered with Chrissy Teigen to produce a documentary about french fries called “Fries.”

After thinking through who we would all want to partner with (Mine was Robert Downey Jr. for Sci-Fi Tech, Leonardo Di Caprio for OceanTech, and JK Rowling for everything else) This brought up the incredible power that celebrities have today. They have built trust through different projects and passions and that has created global brands have spurred power of speech that has never been seen before. It has also spurred cult-like followings.

The power that these celebrities wield borders on godlike. They are expected to have an opinion on every event of the day, and have a strong opinion. Its a dangerous game to expect every celebrity to have a strong knowledge base on all events. People vote by proxy of “Liking” different celebrities.

ex. Because I like Justin Beiber that says something about me, so if you say something bad about Justin Beiber, you are an idiot.

The internet is littered with this type of commentating.

However, at the same time, worlds are colliding! The micro-celebrity, now has the power to become a macro-celebrity. Elon Musk has surpassed celebrity status as a tech deity. Jeff Bezos, is a meme celebrity with the famous “I sell whatever I want” Meme:

We are running into the business of celebrity. The value of global followings. The power that this brings.

The top 1% of celebrities establish fashion, culture, technology, progress and beliefs. We are living in the new age of renaissance, where people in business are building celebrity followings, and celebrities are building global businesses. I believe that the top 1% of celebrities are more powerful than all media companies by multiples.

So the real question is:

Would you rather have $1,000,000 or 1,000,000 followers?