I could swear it wasn’t that long ago that film stars especially or even most tv stars would not appear in commercials selling products, at least not in North America. If they wanted that extra dough they had to go all the way to Japan to avoid the stigma back home.
Now I’m seeing them pop up all the time? What was responsible for this shift?
I can’t really vouch for the era before TV, beyond voices on the radio in my childhood, but there have always been celebrities hawking stuff. Many accepted stars of the day became stars after their commercials made them famous.
Even now, those familiar faces in commercials have moved on up the ladder to roles in soaps and sitcoms and eventually to their own shows or starring roles.
It’s analogous and likely contemporaneous with Movie Stars making the jump into TV. My memory could be off by 10 years (at least) but that was already happening in the 70’s.
even if they went to Japan today everyone would find the commercial on the internet
Celebrities sometimes won’t advertise certain things in certain places to protect their personal brand. Certain musicians and stuff who want to protect the idea that theyre alternative to the mainstream. But it’s not new.
Ronald Reagan’s stint hawking 20 Mule Team Borax on Death Valley Days (1964-65) was, and remains, a source of great amusement to me.
Brad Pitt is one who I know does ads for Japanese market. Is he doing any TV commercials here in the US now?
And some of those radio and TV shows had their stars hawking the products that sponsored the shows as part of the show itself.
Celebrities have been doing commercials as long as TV has existed. And before that, on the radio.
How many A-list Hollywood stars have appeared in TV commercials since, say, the 70s?
Here, in Japan, you turn on the television to find Tommy Lee Jones hawking Boss coffee, George Clooney selling Nespresso, Brad Pitt peddling jeans, Leonardo DiCaprio drinking Jim Beam. In the 80s, Woody Allen advertised department stores.
I don’t think there was any time in the history of television when this level of stars had nearly as much presence in American commercials. Have things changed?
I’m not buying the premise. There’s a number of plausible explanations for how things could have changed. But I see no good reason to buy into the idea that things actually have changed.
There are a decent number of well known celebs in US commercials, but a lot seem to limit it to voice-work. (Kevin Spacey will apparently sell you a Honda for example).
Jack Benny’s radio show is the one that comes to mind…it was sponsored by Jell-O, and the way Don (and occasionally Jack) hyped it up as some amazing ambrosia is vaguely mindblowing.
I remember seing stars sell everything from laundry soap to auto mobiles on night time tv when I was a kid. Desi and Lucy would even come on stage smoking and selling the brand. Dinah Shore sold cars on her show. See the USA in a Chevrolet…
Everyone sold everything in those days.
As others have pointed out, big name movie actors have been doing TV commercials since the 50s.
Some stars, however, did not do TV commercials, feeling it cheapened their image. This was an individual decision, usually by stars after the studio era, who made millions for their movies and didn’t see the need to make more, especially since payments were usually relatively low.
As the international market grew, advertisers in Japan started paying big money for big stars – enough that it was worth it to consider. The fact that the ads were only shown in Japan also helped: if it wasn’t shown in the US, it didn’t cheapen their image in the US.
It’s come to the point where a big name can make enough from US ads to make it worthwhile.
Hollywood stars did newspaper and magazine ads regularly from the time they became household names. They continued to do so well into the television age.
There were several reasons why they didn’t do television commercials. 1) Separate short commercials - magazine-style, they’re called - were not the norm. Program hosts would, as in radio, do commercials integrated into the show by the show’s sole sponsor. 2) Movie studios hated and feared television. They couldn’t prevent stars from appearing on it and getting publicity, but they didn’t have to like their property shilling on a competitor. 3) Stars would have cost a lot of money, and most advertisers in the early days had no money at all. 4) Television looked really bad. It was in black & white on tiny screens with static and fuzz. In magazine and newspaper ads, the top photographers gave star images glossy perfection. 5) Doing live commercials was risky; things went wrong all the time and that didn’t look good.
By the time most of these issues got sorted out in the 1960s, there was a hierarchy of performers and a tradition of movie stars not doing ads. (Television stars didn’t do all that many ads either. Character actors were more likely to be hired.) So as Chuck says, when they thought that tv ads would cheapen their image they were quite likely correct. And that money always is a cure for cheap; even millionaires like to make a quick million or three and could do so in Japan.
Today there’s big money in ads for an occasional star - although they are still an extremely tiny percentage of ads overall. Television is hailed as the better creative medium than the movies - something that would have you put away if you thought that 50 years ago, or even 25. Every medium is just a part of the media culture, and if you’re on any you might as well be on all. And movie stars just aren’t as starry as they used to be. If Adrian Brody is in a Super Bowl ad, who’s Adrian Brody?
Chanel No. 5 commercial from 2012.
IIRC, during live shows, like Johnny Carson in the 60s and early 70s, for part of their break-time ads, Johnny and Ed would walk over to some different part of the stage and do
commercials. Alpo comes to mind…