Marketers have become star-struck. Totes made a deal with Rihanna to create a customized umbrellas. Tiger Woods endorses accenture.

By JULIE CRESWELL

These days, it’s nearly impossible to surf the Internet, open a newspaper or magazine, or watch television without seeing a celebrity selling something, whether it’s umbrellas, soda, cars, phones, clothing or even mutual funds.
But where the star ends and the product and pitch begin has grown less and less discernible in the era of the human billboard.
Nicole Kidman sashays in ads for Chanel No. 5 perfume. Jessica Simpson struts for a hair extension company, HairUWear, and he acne skin-care line Proactiv Solution. And Jamie Lee Curtis spoons up Dannon Activia yogurt while promoting environmentally friendly Honda cars.
Over the last decade, corporate brands have increasingly turned to Hollywood celebrities and musicians to sell their products. Stars showed up in nearly 14 percent of ads last year, according to Millward Brown, a marketing research agency. While that number has more than doubled in the past decade, it is off from a peak of 19 percent in 2004. Celebrities appear in 24 percent of the ads in India and 45 percent in Taiwan.
Stars are likely to continue popping up in ads for a very simple reason: Celebrity sells.
“The reality is people want a piece of something they can’t be,” says Eli Portnoy, a branding strategist.
“They live vicariously through the products and services that those celebrities are tied to. Years from now, our descendants may look at us and say, ‘God, these were the most gullible people who ever lived.’ ”
Companies, trying to align themselves ever closer to A-list stars , are constantly seeking new ways to merge the already-blurry lines between the commercial and entertainment worlds.
Television programmers and music producers are particularly eager to play along as joint marketing deals offer artists new ways to reach audiences while also defraying their own marketing costs. Celebrities have also grown more sophisticated about the structure and payouts of endorsements.
Last fall, the rapper-impresario Sean Combs created a 50-50 joint venture with Diageo, the spirits giant, for Mr. Combs to be the brand manager of the Ciroc vodka line. Mr. Combs says he made the profit-sharing deal only after refusing to work solely as a pitchman.
“My brand is rocket fuel. It would take this brand 10 years to get to where I can take it in one year,” he says. “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to do just endorsements. I want ownership.”
In the few short years since she exploded onto the music scene, Rihanna, a 20- year-old singer from Barbados, has been involved in about a dozen endorsement and licensing deals.
Early last year, marketing executives at Totes Isotoner, a Cincinnati company that had spent the previous 30 years putting out a reliable lineup of humble umbrellas, listened to her tune titled, appropriately, “Umbrella,” which eventually went on to become a huge, Grammy-winning hit.
The song, not yet released at the time, had commercial, jingle-ready lyrics and a catchy hook: “You can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh.” The song became a corporate rallying cry.
Rihanna and her representatives wanted Totes to do more than merely use her to peddle a product. They wanted Totes to create customized umbrellas - all recommended by the emerging star and her team. Totes also guaranteed the singer a percentage of the sales of the umbrellas.
“We’ve worked hard to build me and my name up as a brand,” Rihanna says. “We always want to bring an authentic connection to whatever we do. It must be sincere and people have to feel that.”
But if some consumers don’t really trust celebrities, why do they still run out to buy their perfumes or fashions?
The answer, some analysts say, has its roots in two seismic shifts in the cultural landscape that began in the late 1990s. First has been the emergence of Web sites and magazines that chronicle the mundane activities of stars on a constant basis. A voracious public eager to peek at celebrities shopping for shoes and buying coffee wanted to buy those shoes and drink that coffee themselves.
The other new force has been the explosive growth and mainstreaming of urban hip-hop music and marketing moves by artists like Mr. Combs, Shawn Carter (better known as Jay-Z) and Jennifer Lopez to put their names on clothing lines and fragrances .
“Hip-hop completely opened the eyes of other music genres as to how to relate to corporations and not be seen as sellouts,” says Steve Stoute, an ad executive who has matched such celebrities and brands as Justin Timberlake and McDonald’s and Jay-Z with Reebok.
So are there any limits to what celebrities can endorse, or how far the celebrity pitch could go?
Mr. Stoute points to a picture in the center of a framed front page from a newspaper showing a General Motors S.U.V. in a metallic blue concept color that Jay-Z helped to design.
“That’s Jay-Z blue! We invented a color! There are no limits.
There is no such thing as too far.”