Spice up your talent power playbook

In 1996 five unknown wannabes walked into Smash Hits towers to lip-synch their upcoming debut single (the between-desks office gig being a rite of passage for new acts).

Then editor – and future daytime TV fixture – Kate Thornton didn’t even leave her office having already declared: “Girl groups are not a thing”. Unbowed, this ambitious girl group gamely made their way across town to a rival pop magazine where the editors, looking for a handy hook on which to hang this new phenomenon, duly christened them: Baby, Posh, Ginger, Scary and Sporty. Girl Power was on.

Whether Girl Power was a core belief or just brilliant branding is a matter for more dedicated Spiceologists to debate.

Whether Girl Power was a core belief or just brilliant branding is a matter for more dedicated Spiceologists to debate, but the power Spice Girls held over the entire media landscape for the next few years was both very real and still relevant today. Indeed, as brands and agencies wrestle with the growing influence of influencers, the relationship of mere pop magazines to proper pop icons remains instructive. At least for me.

Here’s three life-long lessons I learned bargaining for access to the Spice Girls…

Above: When the Spice Girls graced the cover of UK pop mag Smash Hits, sales at least doubled.

Don’t overestimate your own power 

Aside from clutter, the most striking feature of the late 90s Smash Hits office was the cover gallery; 12 months of issues papered across an entire wall, with sales figures boldly posted underneath. In a paid media world, creatives don’t typically labour under the shadow of such stark 'viewership' verdicts and, as a direct result, they typically overestimate the power of their own craft and underestimate the impact of brand relationships. 

In this ad-block, TV-streamed age, brands have arguably never been further removed from the eddies of youth culture.

At Smash Hits there was no such hiding place. With every cover featuring the Spice Girls the sales doubled, even tripled. Every cover in between – often when the Spice Girls were gracing the cover of our rival pop mag – sales fell back to base, or dipped below. As a graphic illustration of the power of talent to bootstrap a brand it was a humbling lesson.

Where Geri and co. once held sway, a vast array of TikTok talent now enjoy a similar, vice-like grip on the time and tastes of Gen Z. And, in this ad-block, TV-streamed age, brands have arguably never been further removed from the eddies of youth culture or more reliant on talent to let them back in. Of course, brands and agencies must still strive to get creative right, but get talent wrong in today’s attention economy and all that effort will be wasted.

If talent trumps creative, you might as well make them part of the creative team.

Agency creatives are not exactly famed for their humility but accepting this power dynamic is the first step in creating more effective talent projects. That’s why we see talent not as day-players reading a script, but as co-creators, involved in the concept from the very beginning. After all, if talent trumps creative, you might as well make them part of the creative team.

Above: Redwood BBDO partnered with Anthony Joshua for a Google campaign.

Pretend money isn’t involved

All talent relationships are transactional, but PR-brokered talent access still feels different to a straight pay-to-play. And, when commercials are soft, other factors matter more: talent responds to ideas that inspire them, and to collaborators they admire. As someone who spent most of his career in specialist media, I can testify that genuine, shared passion will often beat out rivals boasting higher numbers.

If we wanted our readers to believe we were besties with Posh, we had to believe it too.

Because no actual cash changed hands, it was much easier to pretend that the Spice Girls came to a photoshoot because they wanted to be there. They had plenty of other offers, after all. And pretending we were just casually hanging out with pop stars was the entire Smash Hits schtick: if teen fans caught even a hint of the UN-level negotiations required to actually agree access this spell would be broken. Pretending is important: if we wanted our readers to believe we were besties with Posh, we had to believe it too.

The same delicate spell now applies to social spaces. If you want influencer partnerships to feel authentic and organic they need to be authentic and organic. And yet, many talent-driven campaigns still feel more like a hostage situation than a passion project. Stunt casting of Hollywood actors makes for some funny TV ads but pull that routine on Twitter and the comments will be choked with cynics speculating what bills the star had to pay.

Many talent-driven campaigns still feel more like a hostage situation than a passion project.

At Redwood BBDO our approach to even high-price talent deals is still editorial at heart. We use PR-windows and deep research into talent passions to find projects for influencers to shape and lead. Looking for the win-win like this can help lower appearance fees but, more importantly, it means we can still pretend the commercials are not a big factor, even when they are. To repeat: pretending is important.