How to Get Your Offers to Celebrities
When I was getting ready to promote the 2008 International Sketch Comedy Competition, I needed a celebrity host. I’d been producing this event for several years – but this time, I intended to market a video of it. And I knew that if I wanted to have a chance of doing that successfully, I needed a “name.”
Luckily, I knew how to reach almost any celebrity in film or television. In fact, I was able to secure the services of someone who was a household name and a heartthrob for millions of teenage girls some years ago… and still gets his name and pictures in the media. I’m talking about Barry Williams, who played Greg Brady in The Brady Bunch. While he’s not currently a star, his appearance in my production helped me get the attention of several major video distributors.
If you want to attract attention to an event you are holding – or to a product or service you are selling – having a celebrity attached to it gives you a huge marketing advantage. And it’s not hard to reach them if you know how. Virtually every celebrity has an agent and/or a manager.
IMDB.com has a program that is only about $10 a month and can be cancelled at any time. Once you sign on as a member, you can search for any celebrity and find a listing with their agent and/or manager, including phone numbers and sometimes even an e-mail address. If you contact the celebrity’s representative in a professional way, your offer will be taken seriously and passed along.
[Ed. Note: Getting a celebrity to “back” your product or event is a great way to get prospective customers’ attention. For 12 other proven marketing strategies, pick up a copy of Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby’s Amazon.com best-seller, Changing the Channel.Paul Lawrence is a screenwriter/producer with several feature-length film credits. For more information on his “Breaking Into Hollywood” course, click here.]
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Paul Lawrence
Paul Lawrence is an entrepreneur who has made his living starting and running a series of profitable businesses. One day while cleaning his mother's pool for a few extra bucks, it dawned on Paul that he could perhaps start his own pool cleaning business. He carefully employed all the marketing techniques that he had learned in school and designed his first flyer. Immediately the business took off and within a week, Paul had his own little business. He quickly expanded, hired employees and then eventually sold it some relatives who made well over $250,000 in the next year before they eventually sold it for a six figure profit. After finishing college, Paul did a brief stint in a management program for a national rental company, but he quickly realized that he was much happier running his own show. Paul left the rental company and launched one of the most financially successful independent ballroom dance instruction companies in the state of Florida where he received quite a bit of media attention for his revolutionary business practices that included front page features in the Life Style section of the Sun Sentinel, features in the Miami Herald, Boca News, Center Stage Entertainment and many others. With that business running profitably, Paul started several other businesses either individually or as partnerships that included a million dollar video production company, a mortgage brokerage, a home maintenance business, several mail order companies, a business consulting service among others.With a love of movies, Paul began to work at breaking into Hollywood as a screenwriter where he's beaten the odds by becoming a produced writer. He is a credited writer for the film CRUEL WORLD, starring Jaime Presley and Eddie Furlong and has signed a development deal for a national television series with one of the world's largest producers of television and films among his half a dozen sales and options of movie scripts he wrote. Paul is the creator of the Quick & Easy Microbusiness program.