Marketer's index helping brands book right celebs.

HIGH-profile celebrity relationships frequently start off hot and heavy and blossom into marriage, only to quickly wind up on the rocks, all in the public eye.

Davie-Brown Entertainment is offering a solution--for celebrity marketing relationships, anyway.

The firm is trying to take the pain and guesswork out of finding the perfect marketing mate with its Davie Brown Index, or DBI--a celebrity-ranking database that pairs brands with the beauty or brawn required to increase product popularity.

Davie-Brown is hoping to make the service, released this spring, indispensable for companies looking for the perfect personality to hawk lipstick, snacks or basketball shoes.

If successful, the index could have a significant impact in the agency and media worlds: Davie-Brown's parent company, TMA, is a division of ad giant Omnicom Group Inc.

For the past 20 years, Davie-Brown has specialized in product placement, matching film spots with clients including "Curious George" for Quaker; "Cars" for State Farm and AT&T; and "Superman Returns" for PepsiCo. brands Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Quaker, SoBe and Tropicana.

The company does more than $10 million in product placement, talent and other related business a year, and anticipates adding over $1 million in business this year, some of which execs hope will come from the DBI launch.

After 18 months of brainstorming, staffers in Davie-Brown's talent division compiled a list of names--think Eva Longoria, Brad Pitt, Barry Bonds and Paris Hilton--that can be matched with prospective companies.

Taking on the Q

The existing industry standard is the Q Score, developed in 1963 by New York-based Marketing Evaluations Inc.

A Q Score measures two things: familiarity and likeability of a celebrity, brand, company, cartoon character, deceased personality or television show. The more well known and popular the item or person being scored is rated, the higher the Q Score.

"A Q score doesn't really get down to the nitty gritty of how a celebrity might be a good spokesperson for a brand," said Tom Meyer, president of Davie-Brown Entertainment. "We evaluate based on what brands might look for when trying to sign a celebrity. You need an accurate assessment of what consumers think before you hitch your wagon to this person."

There are 1,500 celebrities in the DBI, mainly popular types in the current cultural consciousness, such as Britney Spears and Tom Cruise. There are no deceased personalities, comic or cartoon characters, though that could change in the future. The names are presented to randomly selected survey respondents four times per year; companies that want to focus on a particular celebrity are asked detailed questions about their goals. For the celebs, seven key attributes are evaluated: appeal, notice, trendsetting, influence, trust, endorsements and aspirations. Each celebrity is indexed to a specific category such as "Male Film" or "Female Sports."

The criteria for determining assets and negatives were easy enough to determine, but deciding who was in or out of the index was a far less scientific process.

"We filled the database on gut research," Meyer said. "Are they right? Do they look right? It's more shoot-from-the-hip than analytical."

A company looking for a celebrity match can buy in for regular reports, unlimited database runs, or on an a la carte basis, for those who want one-time access.

Meyer said it cost less than $1 million to compile the database, and the firm is looking to land profits in the millions range.

"We believe we can only become the standard if we make this available for everyone, subscribers or not," Meyer said. "This is a for-profit venture. We want it to become a standard for everyone to use and make money off it that way."

Davie Brown's creative team came up with the methodology for the database, which is presently powered by i.think inc., using online surveys to reach a database of 1.5 million consumers in households across the country.

Meyer would not reveal the names of subscribers, but said that agencies including Young & Rubicam, Porter Novelli and BBDO Worldwide have used the service.

"Right now we have about 20 percent of that universe using our celebrity evaluation tool and we're really only a few months into the launch of it," he said. "We still have a long way to go to make it the absolute standard."

Is less more?

"These other companies have all decided more is better in terms of measuring attributes and imagery, but most have come and gone," Levitt said. "More is really less in many cases, because the information can be misleading. Almost doesn't matter if one person is funny or one is credible. What matters is the bottom line. It's like pulling a lever in a voting booth--either you're for or against."

It may be hard to compete with 40 years of historical data, which allows the simpler Q Score to provide information on how a certain celebrity or brand's status has changed over the years.

Q score uses the U.S. Postal Service to deliver its written surveys, which have a response rate of more than 65 percent--higher than most online response rates.

Levitt said that allows the company to reach age groups and other segments of the population typically excluded from online polling.

By ANNE RILEY-KATZ

Staff Reporter