Gifting The Gifted On The Fest Circuit

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Features

Published on Monday, 15 November 2010 10:57

Written by Trent Gough

We’ve all heard of, and probably envied, celebrities who receive gift bags (also know as swag bags, goody bags, etc.) in addition to their stratospheric salaries. These gifts are tied to sophisticated marketing and promotional efforts, frequently handed out at the Golden Globes, Sundance Film Festival, Academy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, plus fashion, sports and entertainment industry events.  

Says Jane Ubell-Meyer, president of Madison & Mulholland, a New York gifting firm, “gifting is about showcasing amazing, new and cool products to the media to create exposure that normally you could not even pay for through advertising.” Ubell-Meyer's company provides gifting services at the Oscars, Emmys, New York’s Fashion Week and VIP gifting for the Hamptons Jitneys, American Airlines and private jets.

“As long as there are red-carpet events and awards shows, celebrity exposure will be generated and gifting will occur,” adds Mark Harris, director of global strategic marketing for Wow Creations, who does gifting around the Oscars, Sundance and other film festivals as well as the William Shatner and alfinso Mourning celebrity charity events, consults on swag’s upside for marketers. “This industry is all about branding.”

That seems to be true. Even when there are no official Oscar gift bags, off-site gifting suites pick up the slack during the week before the event.

For example, Madison & Mulholland set up shop at a Los Angeles mansion called Haven House. The products included Shagui Diamonds (valued in the aggregate at $5 million), Magnolia flat-screen TVs and Pearls of Wisdom T-shirts. And they pulled in celebs like James Woods, Jennifer Tilly, Alan Cummings, Lil’ Kim, and Chevy Chase.

Silver Spoon Entertainment Marketing took a penthouse at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel, offering beauty and spa treatments.

At another Oscar gifting venue, Helen Mirren, who had won Best Actress for the title role that year in The Queen, simply loved two gifts from ezGear. One was an ezWake iPod Alarm Clock Radio, the other ezVision Video Glasses that, when hooked up to a portable DVD player, give you the image of either a 50-inch or 64-inch TV screen, depending on the model. When Mirren was told they would send both products to her after the Oscars, she was apparently enthusiastic enough to have a messenger sent to the suite to pick them up.

Mirren showed she was also willing to pay for certain items. She took advantage of a gift certificate placed in the Distinctive Assets’ bag from Liv’n Out Loud, a trendy t-shirt company. The actress subsequently bought six shirts (two for herself and four for her husband, director Taylor Hackford).

Coinciding with the pre-Oscar festivities, Distinctive Assets made sure that bags went to all the nominees for best actor and actress, Supporting cast and best director. This rarefied list included Mirren, Clint Eastwood, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Hudson, Eddie Murphy, Meryl Streep, Will Smith, Kate Winslett and host Ellen DeGeneres.

The day after the event, Distinctive Assets sent “consolation gift baskets” to the nominees who didn’t win. That year the basket was valued at over $75,000, nearly half of which covered an all-expenses paid trip to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

The tax implications aside, many observers wonder what’s in it for marketers. Will you rush out to buy an item because of a wire service photo of Paris Hilton clutching a giveaway?  Does that make it a worthwhile investment?

Yes — if it’s tied to a major event, sources say.  

“Award shows are incredibly convenient,” says Lash Fary, founder of Distinctive Assets, which has conducted gifting at everything from the Grammy’s to the Kids Choice awards. “There are very few places that you can go backstage where you have 100 of the top names in the whole world coming through.”

The items in a Distinctive Assets bag typically run the gamut from Altoids to $4,000 sports club memberships. There’s an initial fee of $6,000 to get included in the Grammys bag. And if a marketer wants to interact with the celebrities backstage, that’ll cost them $20,000.

Fary likes gift bags to have “a broad range of product mix of recognizable brand names as well as up and coming brands because part of our job is to introduce celebrities to products that they wouldn’t have otherwise come across.”

The Sak, a designer handbag company that sends birthday boxes to 20 carefully chosen stars, has worked with Distinctive Assets for the past four years. “We buy into the lounge about 50% of the time and just the bags the rest,” says Arianna Brooke, vice president of marketing for The Sak.

“We gave Britney Spears one of the Elliot Lucca bags we had at the American Music Awards, and about two weeks later she showed up in a couple different magazines wearing it,” Brooke adds. The bag retails for more than $500.

What’s more, Brooke has gotten thank you cards from Sarah Jessica Parker, Eva Longoria and Charlize Theron. “Just having the celebrities carrying your product sort of influences the people around them,” she says. “They are definitely looked to for direction on trends and fashion.”

Getting the products in the hands of the celebrities is one thing. Getting them to use them is another. Thus, the first challenge is to understand the celebrity lifestyle.

“When you’re Sharon Stone or Teri Hatcher, you can’t go to the makeup counter at Barney’s like most girls, says Ubell-Meyer. “We like to give them a lot of fun new beauty products so they can have that same girly experience of discovering new scrubs, new masks and new eyeliners in the comfort of their own home, things like that.”

And celebrities “realize it’s a quid pro quo thing,” says Gavin B. Keilly, a principal in GBK Productions, a firm that specializes in fundraising and events that hosts gift suites at the Sundance and Cannes Film festivals, the Golden Globes, and the Oscars.  “They’re going into the gifting lounge to get free things in exchange for the photo with the vendor and the vendor uses the pictures on their Web site, trade shows and related print media. It’s a no-brainer for them.”

GBK sold Magellon GPS on the benefits of participating in the pre-Oscar hoopla. “This was the first time for us, and we came back with some nice pictures including Helen Mirren and Penny Marshall,” notes Magellon GPS spokeswoman Angela Linsey Jackson.

The Liv’n Out Loud Clothing Company was quick to take advantage of the opportunity to put their Lifestyle t-shirts in Wow Creations’ celebrity gift bags at Sundance Film Festival and Distinctive Assets’ bags at the Oscars. At the Oscars, the bags went to all the nominees for Best Actor/Actress, Supporting Actors and Best Director including Clint Eastwood, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Hudson, Eddie Murphy, Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep, Will Smith, Kate Winslet and host Ellen DeGeneres.

But isn’t the sight of celebrities grabbing bags of booty just a little unseemly? And what about the tax issue?

Some firms have solved both problems by making it easy for celebrities to give the free stuff away to charity onsite.

At the Golden Globes, Starbucks gave celebrities one-of-a-kind t-shirts designed by Mychael Knight from the hit Bravo Show Project Runway. All of the recipients then autographed the shirts, and they were auctioned off online for the Clothes Off Our Backs children’s charity.

Backstage Creations, run by Karen Wood, operates gifting suites at the Golden Globes, Sundance, People’s Choice Awards and other events, often provides the option for on-site donations through http://charityfolks.com/.

But this probably has had much effect on public perception. Sundance, or “Swagdance” as it was often referred to, had its biggest gifting orgy yet in January of 2007.  A documentary making the rounds of the film festival was aptly titled Sundance Celebrity Swag Hunt, whose two protagonists compete over who can come up with more gifts.

The conclusion? Don’t expect swag to disappear any time soon.   

“More and more people are being pitched and gift bag awareness has spread to more and more events,” Fary says. “Every event now feels they have to have a gift bag and I can’t seem to think of a single company that doesn’t do some sort of celebrity marketing.”

If you can circumnavigate the Cannes Film Festival, the world’s biggest marketplace for the film business, it is a logical next step — just be prepared to spend five times as much.

This year’s event, running two weeks mid-May, presents some challenges for American gifting companies. Products have to be shipped to France and moved through customs. Then there are travel and hotel expenses for companies primarily based in Los Angeles. Sometimes the gifts never arrive and have to be returned to the manufacturer. 

“At Sundance, where a marketer may have spent $2,000, here you are looking at $10,000 plus the cost of getting the product to go to Cannes plus the difficulty in finding lodging,” says Cannes veteran Mark Harris, who is now preparing a gifting villa for this year’s festival with his firm Wow Creations.

Not all of his clients are participating. But several are, including Liv’n Out Loud! Co-founders Alyson Bruu and Kristine Fichera decided to parlay their recent success in the states into international recognition at Cannes.

“We put our clothing in both the Oscars and Sundance gift bags, but couldn’t actually attend either event because of our explosive growth, which reached nearly 6,000% in one year.  We were just too busy to leave even for one day,” says Bruu.

But they soon changed their minds. “When the invite came to go to the French Riviera and be an integral part of a gifting villa in Cannes for five days, meeting and greeting celebrities, it took about three-and-a-half seconds to make the decision to go,” Fichera adds. “We want to take advantage of the face-to-face opportunities that we didn’t tap into at Sundance and the Oscars.”

Another angle to play at Cannes exists in the luxury lifestyle arena. Nikki Beach, whose hotels and resorts caters to an elite clientele, returns to Cannes this month for the third consecutive year with a VIP Gift Suite at the famous Carlton Hotel beachfront.

This suite has been hosted in the past by Hollywood-based gifting diva Nathalie Dubois. Her company, DPA, has handed out gift bags at the Cesar awards in France and the Emmys and Oscars in Hollywood.

Nikki Beach’s 2006 Cannes retreat featured skincare products from Elizabeth Grant, hairstyling Frederic Fekkai and makeup by Face Stockholm. A $30,000 celebrity gift bag included Petrossian caviar, Nikki Beach’s Bubble Yummie terrycloth collection and Caribbean Escapes vacation packages.

Celebrities making the scene have included:

• Sir Elton John
• Lenny Kravitz
• Oliver Stone
• Meryl Streep
• Woody Allen
• Scarlett Johansson
• Salma Hayak
• Paris Hilton
• Sharon Stone
• George Lucas
• Nick Nolte
• Val Kilmer
• Elizabeth Hurley
• Brad Pitt
• Cate Blanchett
• Penelope Cruz

No wonder sponsors like Chopard, Ferreti Yachts, Remy Martin, The W South Beach, Cointreau, Range Rover, Piper Heidsick Champagne, Grey Goose, Bombay Sapphire, Peroni, Evian, LEBLON cachaca and Coca Cola broke the bank to participate.

(courtesy of Insider View Publishing and Syndication)

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