Celebrity endorsements are hardly a new concept for CPG brands, but these talent-brand partnerships have evolved beyond just one-off commercials of A-list actors hawking products they’ve potentially never tried. The type of talent that commands consumer attention is changing, as is the level of involvement celebs are seeking in a business.
Enter Parallel, a creative partnership studio and strategic investment firm, which unites those two interests by brokering partnerships between creative talent and brands. The company was co-founded by Ken Kao, co-founder of Waypoint Entertainment, a production company behind films like The Favourite, and film producer Nic Gonda, while partner Jocelyn Florence previously led the branded content team at Quartz. Together, they act as a “bridge” between entertainment and entrepreneurship, Florence said.
The company earlier this summer helped low-sugar candy brand Behave bring in actor Busy Phillips as an investor and advisor. It has also brokered a partnership with hydration brand Cure and creator Caitlin Murray, produced content for the Venus Williams-co-founded protein drink brand Happy Viking, and also invested in ready-to-eat meal brand Proper Good and non-alc beverage brand HOP WTR.
“We can kind of speak the language of entertainment, and we can also understand what founders or startup teams are going through, because we’ve all kind of spent both time on both sides of that,” Florence told Retail Brew.
Star power: Parallel has a “bespoke” process for evaluating brands, but in general, it starts by taking a look at the brand’s goals for the next 18 months, not just in terms of marketing, but the business overall, she said. Then, it digs into the team and finances allocated to the partnership and the ways in which the talent could potentially support the brand. To match the brand with the right talent, it works to understand the brand’s target audience and any data they have on this demographic.
As it’s creating a potential list of names of talent to work with, it’s running focus groups to test the ideas out. Parallel also has a team of “culture mongers” who are tapped into culture “across different disciplines,” to create a list of names many of which the brands don’t know.
“Why hire us if you’re just going to come up with the same 10 names that every brand would love to work with?” she said.
In the case of Parallel’s most recent match between Behave and Busy Phillips, Florence said Phillips had been a vocal candy fan and had already tried the low-sugar candy prior. Parallel wanted to ensure the partnership would go beyond posting on socials, as Phillips joined as an investor and advisor. (Parallel has said its deals fall in the 0.5% to 15% equity range for talent). For some talent, Florence noted it sometimes “requires much more education to grasp the value of equity and what it means to be involved in a startup versus a Unilever brand,” but Phillips didn’t need that education.
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The partnership has led to a 300% bump in Behave’s e-commerce sales and 23x growth of their Instagram reach, according to Parallel. But these partnerships can also have longer term impacts, with Florence pointing to Venus Williams’s business acumen in the growth of Happy Viking (“If you put her on a call with a key potential account, or honestly even one of your top salespeople, she knows how to motivate people,” Florence noted.) She said talent partners may also meet with retail distributors or advise on a brand’s creative direction.
Florence noted the strategic investment side of the business—which largely focuses on health and wellness companies, quite often CPG ones—is “emphatically linked” with its talent side as investment often comes after working on a talent partnership for a brand.
Name dropping: Parallel has also begun incubating brands, and is currently working on a “consciously-crafted clean beauty brand,” according to its website. Florence said this brand is founded by a “pretty well-known actress and her sister” she couldn’t name.
While celebrity-founded and backed brands have filled the market in recent years, Florence doesn’t believe there’s a risk of oversaturation in the space. She said she believes consumers have developed “really finely tuned BS meters” that can spot an inauthentic brand or partnership from a mile away. Recall the backlash last year when Blake Lively and Jennifer Lopez, who both previously stated they didn’t drink alcohol, debuted their own pre-made alcoholic cocktail brands. “The market will correct itself,” she said, and a bad product is a bad product, no matter what.
“The starting point has to be a strong product,” she said. “If it’s not gonna work without a celebrity, it’s not gonna work with it.”