Choosing a celebrity ambassador is not choosing a face

Jennifer Lopez. Céline Dion. Kate Moss. I had the opportunity to work with all three at different moments in my career, and those experiences taught me something that no algorithm, EMV score or follower count can replace: choosing a celebrity is not choosing an audience. It is choosing what that person will do to your brand.

My career has taken me through some of the world’s leading luxury, beauty and fashion houses, including Coty and Longchamp. Those years shaped the way I still approach image, reputation and talent strategy today: not as questions of exposure alone, but as long-term decisions about what a brand wants to become.

What celebrity fragrances taught me at Coty

At Coty in the early 2000s, I experienced first-hand the rise of celebrity fragrances. Jennifer Lopez and Céline Dion demonstrated that a celebrity could become far more than the face of a campaign. Their identity, personality and cultural relevance could become genuine commercial and reputational assets for a brand.

Glow by JLo exceeded $100 million in sales in its first year, while the franchise quickly reached another scale with Still. Céline Dion’s first fragrance generated $11.7 million in its first year and became the only new launch to enter the US women’s fragrance Top 10 at the time. Two years later, the franchise was approaching $100 million in global sales.

What we understood then, long before social media turned influence into an industry of metrics, was that the right personality could create value far beyond media exposure. A celebrity could shape perception, accelerate desirability and give a product an entire cultural universe.

What Kate Moss brought to Longchamp

Later, at Longchamp, I experienced another dimension of celebrity partnership through Kate Moss. Her agent knew my experience in talent management and trusted me with the relationship. Kate first became an ambassador and then a creative collaborator, leading to the launch of Kate Moss for Longchamp in 2010.

The collaboration included 28 designs distributed through nearly 2,000 points of sale worldwide. But what remains most interesting to me was never simply the commercial performance. Kate transferred part of her own cultural capital to Longchamp: fashion, London, rock, irreverence and international desirability.

She changed something in the perception of the brand. Was she the safest possible choice? No. She was the right choice.And that distinction remains fundamental when selecting a talent today.

A brand never signs with an image alone

The relationship between Neutrogena and Hayden Panettiere, which returned to public attention more than a decade after their collaboration, illustrates the other side of the equation. When a brand chooses an ambassador, it connects its own narrative to the story of a real person, including their values, commitments, vulnerabilities, future choices and potential controversies.

This is why I have never considered celebrity casting to be simply a media decision. It is a strategic decision and, sometimes, a calculated risk. The consequences of an association can extend far beyond the duration of a contract or advertising campaign.

Today, there is another dimension: LLMs

What has changed considerably is the environment in which these associations continue to exist. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity can synthesise years of articles, interviews, digital content and historical associations when constructing an understanding of a brand.

A collaboration that ended ten or fifteen years ago can therefore still contribute to the answer generated when someone asks an AI: What does this brand represent? Who is it associated with? What is its cultural identity?

Celebrity casting is becoming a question of GEO and algorithmic reputation as well as image and influence. Brands are no longer only building associations in the minds of consumers. They are contributing to an information ecosystem that may influence how LLMs interpret them for years to come.

The questions I would ask today

As some ambassador contracts reach tens of millions, decisions are still too often framed primarily around followers, reach, engagement or EMV. These metrics are useful, but they cannot tell us whether someone is strategically right for a brand.

The questions I learned to ask throughout my career remain much more fundamental. Why her? Why now? What cultural territory will she bring to the brand? What will she change in its perception? What weak signals should we consider? And today, I would add another: what might an LLM understand about this association five or ten years from now?

Choosing an ambassador requires data, but it also requires experience. It means understanding brands, knowing talents and their agents, reading cultural shifts, anticipating risk and sometimes defending the choice that an algorithm would never have made.

From experience to Luxury Narrative Intelligence

This experience acquired inside major international houses is one of the foundations of the approach I have developed today at KALEA Communications. After more than twenty-five years working across luxury, beauty and fashion, I wanted to connect this understanding of brands, reputation and cultural influence with the new ways in which brands are being interpreted and recommended by artificial intelligence.

Through Luxury Narrative Intelligence, we look not only at the immediate visibility created by a talent association, but also at its narrative, cultural and reputational coherence and at the signals it may create within AI environments.

Because ultimately, my conviction has not changed. The best ambassador is not necessarily the most famous. It is the one who increases the cultural value of a brand without diluting its identity, today and in the memory of AI tomorrow.
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