celebrity · endorsements
How to Get a Celebrity to Endorse Your Product
The person who controls a celebrity deal is almost never the celebrity. This is the question and answer version of who approves it inside a brand, what legal is looking for, why the fee is the smallest argument, and the four structures the deal can take.
Key takeaways
- Four groups approve a celebrity deal inside a brand, and they go in order, marketing, finance, legal, then executive leadership.
- The celebrity fee can be 50 to 70 percent of the whole campaign budget.
- Legal checks four things every time, the morality clause, exclusivity, who owns the content, and FTC and FDA compliance.
- 67 percent of US marketing professionals say their teams regularly miss cultural moments because review and approval take too long.
- There are four deal structures, and equity partnerships carry the highest return and the highest risk.
The celebrity fee can be 50 to 70 percent of the whole campaign budget, and it is still the smallest argument in the room. The rights and the exclusivity are where the real money moves.
This is part one of our celebrity partnerships series, and it is written as questions and answers, because that is how the questions actually arrive.
Every answer below is lifted from our own research notes on celebrity and creator partnerships, and where a number came from somewhere, the source is named underneath it.
Who inside a brand actually approves a celebrity deal?
A. Four groups, in order.
- Marketing and brand management, the initiators. The process begins with the marketing team, often led by the CMO or the VP of Brand, and they identify the strategic need, define the target audience, and pick a celebrity whose persona matches the brand's values. They write the creative brief, set the KPIs, decide the deliverables like posts, appearances and product collaborations, and propose the first budget. They sign off on the strategic fit, the creative direction, and the projected return.
- Finance and procurement, the validators. Once there is a candidate and a rough scope, finance runs the cost benefit analysis, negotiates the fee, which can be 50 to 70 percent of the whole campaign budget, and structures the payment terms, whether that is a flat fee, equity, or performance bonuses. They sign off on the money, the payment schedule, and the resources.
Source, The Celebrity Source and UpCounsel on endorsement contracts
- Legal and compliance, the protectors. In wellness this is the most critical and usually the slowest stage. They draft and negotiate the contract, and they sign off last on every term so the brand is protected.
- Executive leadership, the final approvers. On a big, high profile deal the sign off goes up to the CEO, and sometimes the board, who look at the strategic impact, the risk to the company's reputation, and whether it fits the long term goals.
Who are the big talent agencies?
A. The big three, and they each frame it differently.
- Creative Artists Agency, CAA. Based in Los Angeles, a titan of the industry, and it built CAA Brand Management specifically to create revenue generating consumer product partnerships, representing top tier talent across every entertainment sector.
- William Morris Endeavor, WME. A huge roster of artists and creators, with a Brand Partnerships division that specialises in non traditional relationships and building whole businesses for entrepreneurial clients, for example the alliance it built between John Cena and McDonald's.
- United Talent Agency, UTA. Expert in brand strategy, focused on talent brand strategy, endorsements, sponsorships and integrated marketing.
Can we work with someone like Peter Attia?
A. Only by passing his standards, not by paying him.
Dr Peter Attia works in medical longevity and healthspan, and his strength is Instagram, over 1 million followers, plus his podcast, The Drive. He is famously selective and states explicitly that he does not promote third party products through traditional social ads, though he does highlight specific brands to his members, for example Maui Nui Venison and ROKA. A brand that can survive his scientific scrutiny gets a rare and deeply trusted endorsement.
Source, Peter Attia MD, Exclusive Member Discounts, 2026.
What is legal actually looking for in the contract?
A. Four things, every time.
- Morality clauses, so the brand can end the agreement if the celebrity does something that damages its reputation.
- Exclusivity, so the celebrity cannot endorse a competitor for an agreed period.
- Intellectual property, meaning who owns the content made during the campaign.
- Regulatory compliance, meaning FTC rules on disclosing a paid partnership with #ad or #sponsored, and FDA rules on health claims.
Why does approval take so long at a wellness brand?
A. Because wellness brands sit under two regulators at once, the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, which covers labels and safety, and the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, which covers whether the advertising is truthful.
The challenge is that the FTC requires every claim, including the ones a celebrity makes, to be truthful, not misleading, and backed by competent and reliable scientific evidence. If a celebrity implies a supplement cures a condition, or guarantees a result, without the clinical backing, both the celebrity and the brand can face heavy fines and reputational damage.
The bottleneck is that legal and scientific affairs have to read every claim, every caption, and every video script, which means several rounds of revisions and a launch that keeps slipping.
What happens when the celebrity's values do not match the brand's?
A. The endorsement can backfire spectacularly, because authenticity is the whole point of the partnership.
The challenge is reputational, a brand is exposed if its endorser ends up in a scandal, and forced pairings erode trust on their own, for example a celebrity endorsing a vegan product while publicly eating meat.
The bottleneck is the morality clause itself, which gets contentious, because the celebrity's representatives push hard to limit how subjectively the brand can terminate.
What does being slow actually cost?
A. A lot. 67 percent of US marketing professionals say their teams regularly miss important cultural moments because review and approval take too long.
On TikTok the trends cycle faster than ever, the average lifespan of a trend keeps shrinking, and content takes about 35 days to reach 95 percent of its total views. When a trend hits, like the Sleepy Girl Mocktail, which is tart cherry juice and magnesium powder, or a viral fitness challenge, the window to join in is narrow. If a brand takes four weeks to launch around a trend that peaks in two, it misses the conversation completely, spends the budget on stale content, and hands the share to a faster competitor.
Source, the 67 percent figure comes from EMARKETER and the 35 day figure from Measure Studio
How is AI being used to vet a celebrity before signing?
A. In three ways, and one older idea sits underneath all of it.
The older idea is congruency and cognitive load, the match up hypothesis, which says the message persuades more when the celebrity, the brand and the audience genuinely fit together.
- Audience overlap analysis. Brands want a minimum of 60 to 70 percent demographic overlap between the celebrity's audience and their target market, and AI is used to check that the overlap is genuine and not superficial.
Source, The Celebrity Source, How to Find the Right Celebrity to Represent Your Brand
- Predictive performance modelling. Historical data is used to model engagement and return before the contract is signed.
- Dark social monitoring. Normal social listening only sees public conversation, while a lot of brand talk happens privately in messaging apps and email, and newer tools try to read sentiment there to get a truer picture of someone's influence.
What are the main ways to structure a celebrity partnership?
A. Four models, and they behave very differently.
| Partnership model | Description | Cost structure | ROI profile | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional endorsement | Paid posts, ad campaigns, or appearances with no product involvement. | High flat fees, millions per post for A listers. | Low to moderate. Short term sales spikes, limited long term brand equity. | Product launches, event promotion, broad awareness. |
| Brand ambassadorship | A multi year, multi campaign relationship that builds long term association. | Retainer fees, performance bonuses, sometimes a small equity stake. | Moderate to high. Trust compounds and awareness is sustained. | Owning a category, long term brand building. |
| Co created lines | The celebrity works on the design or the formula, for example a signature flavour or supplement stack. | Revenue share, royalties, upfront development fees. | High. A more genuine connection and a celebrity motivated to promote it. | Reaching new demographics, reviving mature product lines. |
| Equity or founder partnerships | The celebrity takes a real equity stake, or a title like Chief Creative Officer. | Significant equity, often instead of cash, plus board seats. | Highest, and highest risk. The celebrity's money outcome is tied to the brand's. | Startups scaling fast, big pivots, preparing for an acquisition. |
A royalty or licensing deal, meaning a percentage of sales, has its own catch, it creates margin pressure, because the celebrity is rewarded on top line sales and not on profit.
A spokesperson role is narrower again, it is tied to one product category or one message over a set window, think a financial services brand signing a known athlete for a single sporting season.
The takeaway for a large brand is that return should never be measured only in immediate direct response sales. The enterprise numbers are earned media value, a lower customer acquisition cost over time, and growth in the value of the company itself.
What is the Erewhon smoothie model, and why is it clever?
A. Erewhon turned celebrity collaborations into a self funding, multi layered revenue machine that most brands have not cracked.
Here is how it works.
- Erewhon co designs a limited edition smoothie with a celebrity, for example Hailey Bieber, Sabrina Carpenter, Kourtney Kardashian or Olivia Rodrigo.
- The celebrity earns one dollar per smoothie sold, a royalty, not a flat fee.
- Up to five ingredient brands pay an inclusion fee to be credited in the recipe, so Erewhon is making money before a single drink is sold.
- The celebrity posts to their audience, which brings a flood of user content and press.
- The window is limited, often 30 days, timed to an album release or a brand launch, which creates urgency and scarcity.
Why give creators equity instead of a flat fee?
A. Because the promotion keeps going after the invoice is paid.
Liquid Death pioneered this with a three tier ambassador structure that includes celebrity investors like Tony Hawk and Martha Stewart. Offering equity instead of flat fees means those people promote the brand consistently, because they believe in it and they gain from the long term outcome. The company reached a 1.4 billion dollar valuation and 30 billion earned media impressions on under 2 million dollars of traditional ad spend.
Source, Sacra, Liquid Death revenue, valuation and funding
Gymshark did the same thing from the other direction, it moved from sending free apparel to formal long term deals with Gymshark Athletes, who got signature collections and revenue shares, which effectively made them co owners of their own product lines, so their income depended on sales continuing.
AG1 moved past standard ad reads too, Tim Ferriss went from podcast partner to company investor, and Andrew Huberman went from a multi year sponsor to a Medical Advisor for the brand.
The pattern behind all of it is that the most successful influencer campaigns are not campaigns at all, they are structurally aligned ecosystems. Gymshark, Liquid Death, AG1 and Notion all gave creators skin in the game, escalated trust through long partnerships, and built products people want to share, which turns the program into a growth engine that sustains itself.
What is key person risk?
A. Equity alignment pushes the valuation up, and it introduces a new problem at the same time.
If the brand's identity depends entirely on the celebrity, one scandal or one loss of interest can wreck the value of the company. An investor writing a 100 million dollar cheque will do heavy diligence on whether the partnership is genuine, and on whether the brand could eventually stand on its own.
As Elizabeth Ahern put it on LinkedIn in 2026, "Fame creates trial. Only value creates loyalty. That's the difference between a launch and a lasting brand."
Source, Elizabeth Ahern on LinkedIn, 2026.
Are celebrity backed brands really worth more?
A. Yes, on average about 30 percent more.
Market data shows celebrity founded or heavily celebrity backed consumer brands carry valuations around 30 percent higher than comparable companies without one. The premium exists because an acquirer or a growth equity investor is not only buying a product, they are buying a marketing engine that is already attached, which lowers customer acquisition cost and speeds up scale.
The main reason is that acquisition cost has become brutal. Since the iOS 14 privacy changes in 2021 digital marketing costs have shot up, and the average paid social acquisition cost for consumer goods now runs 35 to 65 dollars per customer.
Source, the 30 percent premium comes from Sandbox Studios Ventures and Social Life Magazine . The acquisition cost range comes from Brand Capital Fund . Both premium sources are promotional rather than independent, so treat that number as directional.
For context on the base number, valuing a large consumer goods company leans on scale, margins and brand equity, and mid to large cap consumer brands generally trade at 7 to 12 times EBITDA, while high growth brands that are not profitable yet trade on revenue multiples of 3 to 5 times.
Source, Iconic, What Drives CPG Valuation Multiples in 2026
What happens to most celebrity brands?
A. They die. In 2024 alone 127 celebrity brands shut down, from Lewis Hamilton's Neat Burger to several athlete backed beverages that never got past launch.
Source, Scott Van den Berg, I Analyzed Every Celebrity Brand That Failed in 2024, LinkedIn, August 2025.
The pattern repeats across every category, a spike, a cliff, then a slow delisting. The job is to still be standing, and growing, when that happens.
Where We Come In
The four groups above are the reason a celebrity deal takes six to twelve weeks and not six days, and most of that time is spent on rights and exclusivity rather than on the fee.
We run that process for brands, which means naming the money in the first email to the agency, holding the term and the usage window, and telling you when the name you want will not survive its own vetting.
If you want to see what the money bought elsewhere before you spend yours, part two of this series covers what worked, what blew up, and how the brands measured it.
Send us the shortlist and we will tell you who is reachable, what they will cost, and who is not worth the call. Speak with us when you are ready to start.
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Frequently asked
How does a large brand get a celebrity to endorse its product?
You go through the person who controls the deal, which is almost never the celebrity. That is a talent agent, a manager, or a brand partnerships lawyer, and they want to see a budget, a term, and a usage window before they will take the call. Big brands get further faster because the first email already names the money.
Who do you contact to sponsor a celebrity?
Their agency handles paid work, their manager handles the relationship, and larger names have a separate brand partnerships contact. Cold messages to a personal account get ignored. A written offer sent to the agency gets read.
What does a celebrity endorsement deal actually involve?
A named fee, a set list of deliverables, a term of months, the markets you can run in, and the rights to reuse the content in paid media. The fee is usually the smallest argument. The rights and the exclusivity are where the real money moves.
How does an endorsement deal get done?
Offer to the agent, agreement on fee and term, then a long negotiation over rights and exclusivity, then legal review, then contract, then production. For a big name expect six to twelve weeks from first email to signed, so work back from your launch date.
What contract terms matter most in a celebrity endorsement?
Paid usage rights, because without them you cannot run the content as an ad. Exclusivity, so they are not promoting your competitor next month. And a clear morality and exit clause, because reputation risk is the single largest cost a big brand carries here.
Do we own the content a celebrity makes for us?
Not unless the contract says so. The default is a limited licence for a set time on set platforms. If you want to run it as paid media or use it past the term, that is negotiated and priced up front.
What does a celebrity endorsement cost?
It moves with fame, category, term, and rights, not with follower count. A single social post from a mid-tier name sits in the tens of thousands. A year long ambassador deal with a household name runs into seven figures. Anyone quoting one flat number is guessing.