• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, April 4, 2008

Death can't keep a good celebrity down--a reality that marketers caught onto long ago.

Indeed, the famous deceased are so in demand for advertising and marketing of all stripes that Forbes last October published its seventh annual list of "Top-Earning Dead Celebrities--which showed that the top 13 raked in $232 million in combined revenue during the previous 12 months.

But even in death, can celebs' star power be vulnerable to the whims of the fickle public?

For this answer we turn, in the words of Rod Serling (Deceased Class of 1975), to "Exhibit A": the latest rankings from the "Dead Q" study.

Since 1997, the study has been conducted every two years by Marketing Evaluations, Inc., The Q Scores Company, known for research that helps marketers assess the fit of celebrity endorsement candidates, dead or alive.

Q Scores surveys a representative sample of U.S. adults about the familiarity and appeal of approximately 165 personalities per study, including actors/actresses, sports figures, comedians/comediennes, musicians, authors and chefs.

The 10th anniversary Dead Q rankings drive home the amazing endurance of certain celebs. As MEI/Q Scores president Steve Levitt points out, one would think that scores for virtually any famous figure would decline somewhat as each decade goes by, due to the "out of sight, out of mind" factor. But not so for a surprising number of those who have shuffled off this mortal coil, even prior to 1997.

For example, it turns out that both the Q/popularity and familiarity rankings for Lucille Ball, Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley and John Belushi have barely budged over the past decade. (For the uninitiated, a Q score represents the percentage of people, from among those who are familiar with the celebrity, who rate him or her as "one of my favorites.")

As you may have already guessed, among these four, Elvis (deceased 1977, but still reportedly in the building) rules when it comes to familiarity--recognized by 98% as of last year.

However, Ball (deceased 1989) is nearly as familiar (96%), and she beats The King on popularity, with a Q score of 52% (identical to '97), to his 36% (up two percentage points from '97).

Belushi (deceased 1982) comes in with 92% familiarity, down one point versus '97, and a 31% Q, up five points from '97. Armstrong (deceased 1971) is familiar to 88%, with a Q of 26%--down one point on the former, but up three on the latter.

But who, among all dead luminaries, are the most popular with today's celebrity-obsessed consumers?

Lucille Ball, Walt Disney, Bob Hope, John Wayne and ... Red Skelton, according to MEI/Q Scores President Steve Levitt.

Why Skelton (deceased 1997)? "God only knows," says Levitt, adding that his intention is not derogatory, and that the same could be said of many of the dead celebrities whose popularity has weathered time. "Each one is a story unto him or herself."

Still, Levitt points out that those who have made us laugh do tend to dominate the upper ranks of the beloved. In addition to Hope and Skelton, those with consistently high Q scores over the years include The Three Stooges, Don Knotts, John Ritter and Charles Schultz, he reports.

And the factors behind the enduring familiarity/appeal of certain names seems fairly clear: the Disney brand's continuing power/ubiquity and Wayne's iconic heroic image, for example.

(Levitt reports that Wayne's one temporarily damaging mistake in life was to star, on horseback, in a Datril 500 commercial. Consumers surveyed on their impressions resoundingly said that Wayne was "in-credible, as in not credible, because cowboys don't get headaches," Levitt says.)

And although a deeper dive into the demographics of Dead Q survey respondents might well reveal that some of these celebs are more popular with the older set than younger people, Levitt stresses that the samples are representative. Which means, for example, that for Skelton to achieve his "terrific" 82% familiarity score last year, the younger crowd's familiarity with him must be somewhere in the 60% to 70% range, even with scores in the 90% and higher range among older Americans.

Which dead celebrities have the least appeal? Levitt says that Alan King, Joey Bishop and Andy Kauffman are among those with single-digit Q scores. "They made a contribution, but they never had truly broad-based appeal," he observes.

Can recent appearances in major advertising/marketing campaigns "revive" the dead? Not according to Q data, which indicate that celebrities tend to be no better off, profile- and popularity-wise, dead than alive. In life, the Q scores of King, Bishop and Kauffman "were never strong," Levitt points out.

Furthermore, he says, "if the advertising industry is honest with itself, it will admit that only a small percentage of people ever see a campaign, however big it may be." Exposure--even among a target audience--is not likely to be significant enough to create real buzz around a dead star who wasn't already known and loved, he adds.

Instead, most marketers use Q data to assess the existing appeal and attention-getting power of deceased celebrities who may tie in well with their messages, Levitt confirms. Using Fred Astaire as a dancing partner for a Dirt Devil presumably worked because of its lighthearted way of employing Astaire's flair for making extraordinary moves look easy to make it appear that the vacuum was doing much of the work, he notes.

But Levitt cautions that even some dead stars can prove too iconic and powerful for the purpose of selling products, overwhelming the sales message.

And when it comes to the living, this can get even trickier. "Try putting George Clooney in a commercial directed to women," he challenges. "Not one woman will remember a thing about what product was being sold."