Marketers will soon have a new resource to help them gauge how much celebrity endorsers contribute to their advertising strategies. Ad agency holding firm Omnicon Group is launching a new company
through its Davie-Brown entertainment-marketing operation that will try to measure how much a celebrity can influence consumers' decisions to buy a product. "Some of these celebrities cost quite a
bit of money," says Jeff Chown, president of Davie-Brown Talent. An advertiser, he adds, "needs to know if they are getting their return on that investment." The new company will compete with
Marketing Evaluations, the Long Island firm that has measured celebrity appeal for decades with its so-called "Q Scores." Marketing Evaluations mails out regular surveys, asking about celebrities'
likeability and familiarity, to groups of people selected from a 100,000-strong database. Another firm, E-Poll Market Research of Encino, Calif., has offered competing rankings based on a larger set
of criteria since 1997. Still, ad executives say Q Scores remain by far the best-known measure. But shifts in the marketing landscape may give Davie-Brown a chance to establish a foothold in the
field.
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