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Getting Your Brand On 'Oprah'

  • Ad Age, Monday, June 2, 2008 9:11 AM
Want to get your brand on Oprah? The fabled hawker-donor of Pontiacs and patron saint of everything from soft-rock sensation Josh Groban to Boudreaux's Butt Paste doesn't do structured brand-integration deals or, technically at least, live commercials. And her company, Harpo Productions, tightly controls advance and post-publicity about the praise that gets parceled out.

It helps a whole lot if Oprah likes your brand or its ads. It helps more still if Oprah's producers like you. And it possibly helps even more if Oprah likes you or the person endorsing your brand. Both Oprah's Harpo Productions and marketers deny quid pro quos. And the successes of such smaller brands as Kitchen Aid and Dolly Parton indicate one need not pay to play on "Oprah."

But it's less clear she alone can move the needle for big brands. Her embrace of "Tar-zhay" in the early 1990s helped give Target cachet. Then again, she also did an extensive 1998 segment in which she refurbished a living room entirely with house wares from Wal-Mart, which has remained one of the company's weakest.

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