What Can't They Live Without?
As I’ve stated elsewhere, the twin fantasy of celebrity endorsements is that the celebrity’s dependence upon goods and services humanizes them and brings them down to earth, while at the same time, our peering into the celebrity’s shopping list can serve as a recipe for our inevitable celebrity; if we could buy like them, we could be like them.
But all fiction requires suspension of disbelief. In the case of celebrity endorsement, we understand that while Travis Scott may truly love his burger, that Tina Turner might drink Pepsi, the reason they appear today on our TV screens and TikToks is because PepsiCo and McDonalds have wired unimaginable sums of money into their bank accounts.
The Strategist’s “What They Can’t Live Without” series, then, is one of the few ways that affiliate marketing can be more truthful, journalistic than its antecedents. “What They Can’t Live Without” follows a simple format: The Strategist interrogates a celebrity, they list the products they rely on, and then The Strategist includes inline links to those products with affiliate marketing tags, the affiliate marketer’s bread and butter. If someone clicks on the link and buys, oh, the same lipstick as Serena Williams, The Strategist makes money.
The reason that this expands beyond the ordinary product endorsement, and does not strain disbelief like old Pepsi ads, has to do with that great beast that has transformed so much of modern commercial culture: Amazon.
Amazon’s affiliate marketing program allows partner entities, such as The Strategist, to receive a flat 10% commission on any products available on Amazon. As of 2019, 2.5 million sellers use Amazon. Virtually all major brands sell on Amazon, so Amazon’s affiliate marketing program allows partners to make money recommending virtually any product. Since the marketing dollars come from Amazon rather than the specific product producer, since money does not pass from PepsiCo to Tina Turner but rather from Amazon to The Strategist, celebrity endorsements hosted on The Strategist’s site feel more candid.
I’ve pondered before what affiliate marketers let us see, how they help us interrogate our world of products. Here, the answer is obvious: it lets us participate in the fantasy of celebrity endorsement but without all of the bullshit. We can actually know, for real, what Taraji P Henson and Neil Gaiman consume, how they are like us and how we can be like them. We lust for this knowledge: The Strategist has published 9 of these pieces in February 2021 alone, and so I can only imagine the clicks and affiliate marketing dollars these posts yield.
The Strategist’s eyes are an important lens through which we see celebrities. And seeing celebrities in terms of their products, like seeing the pandemic in terms of bad buys and directors in terms of Funko Pops, can yield fascinating insights.
As mentioned before, our desire to become like the celebrity underpins all celebrity endorsement, and most celebrities do share with The Strategist the products which have ostensibly secured their success.
Let’s take Neil Gaiman: he recently switched from using Moleskin notebooks to Leuchtterm notebooks. The switch was rather recent, at the recommendation of Joe Hill (author, and Stephen King’s son). Neil Gaiman lists Leuchtterm’s benefits over Moleskin: Leuchtterm notebooks come with two bookmarks, numbered pages, and a table of contents. I can personally verify that they keep writing organized and tidy and that Gaiman likes them for good reason. His description of the product, the actual ways that Leuchtterm outclasses Moleskin, may compel writers, thinkers, and diarists to make the switch, but I think for most of the people who click on an article about Neil Gaiman, these merits will not be the sole thing that compels readers to purchase a notebook. The idea that maybe these notebooks might make one write a bit more like fantasy-book-royalty Neil Gaiman certainly tempts. If this notebook organizes the thoughts of the writer of American Gods, maybe it too can organize your thoughts to that caliber.
Jason Derulo uses Avid Pro Tools to make his music. You can imitate Taraji P Henson’s inimitable looks with Paul Scerri pH Balancing Cream. Art critic and Artforum editor David Velasco shares his favorite art book. And while there are entries where the celebrity does not offer a product related to their renown (Serena Williams, for better or for worse, has no nutritional supplements or sportswear she’d recommend), in the majority of cases the celebrity does make such career-oriented recommendations, and I think their readership expects this.
Previously, I noted that Shaq pitching for Steady didn’t work because a celebrity endorsement is incompatible with the idea of work. The above seems contrapuntal—to write in a journal like Neil Gaiman is to work like him. But, I think that mistakes what happens when someone buys a Luechtterm on Gaiman’s advice. I think that people prone to such fantasy believe that the notebook will make them successful like Gaiman, generative of blockbuster ideas like Gaiman. Quality of output is the fantasy, not the actual creative routines of a writer. But likely they desire more than just quality of output; they desire not just to write a bestseller, but the money and celebrity that comes with writing a work of renown. If one were to produce at Gaiman’s level, one could also tour the world like Gaiman, be recognized from across the room. To be enamored with success and fame and to be enamored with the work of an artist are indeed two separate things, as Mark Manson has argued well. I believe that those buying Pro Tools because of Derulo or a new notebook because of Gaiman likely mistake the two. Certainly, Derulo hyping Pro Tools may be the push that a young producer needs to learn that difficult piece of software, and buying a Leuchtterm under Gaiman’s advisement may commit a writer to a lucid journaling practice. But, I have spoken before about how we mistake the purchase of a product for the development of a skill set. For example, I bought three sketchbooks in a five year period, but only started learning how to draw in the last year. “Wanting to know how to draw” and “committing to a daily drawing practice” are two distinct things; as are “being Neil Gaiman” and “writing in a nice, page-numbered journal.” I warrant that, if the allure of the former did not exist, The Strategist would simply display the specifications of various products and hope that this will lobby the reader into a purchase. They have, in fact, done so before: Leuchtterm came in as the 11th best notebook. But they know simple specifications may move some product, but that adoration of celebrity can move much more, should their readership believe that such a product could secure celebrity for themselves.
The other allure of endorsement is that we want human, proletarian celebrities. The garishness of the celebrity lifestyle has gotten the stars into trouble recently: Chrissy Teigen’s $13,000 wine bottle comes to mind.
Grounding celebrities in everyday products, and averting the inevitable class war where we’ll lop the heads off of everyone in Hollywood, is an explicit goal of “What They Can’t Live Without.” Starting each article, a little italic blurb states:
If you’re like us, you’ve probably wondered what famous people add to their carts. Not the JAR brooch and Louis XV chair but the hair spray and the electric toothbrush.
The promise here is nothing that we plebeians couldn’t afford, nothing that would make us envy the celebrity’s deep pockets. No Chrissy Teigen wine.
This serves at least two goals I have outlined before. At once, it lets us imagine that the celebrities are, at the end of the day, as humble and simple as we. We might even convince ourselves that there does not exist such a gulf of difference between us and them, that they don’t pal around with billionaire pedophiles or drug women for decades with impunity.
If we can’t go so far as to forget their more lavish purchases, I also argue that endorsements give us the ability to live a humble slice of the celebrity life; we can’t be Travis Scott, but we can have his burger, an economy class ticket to his lavish lifestyle. There’s something similar in an aspiring writer purchasing a Leuchtterm on Gaiman’s recommendation. They may not be able to write like him, but with a Leuchtterm, in a much humbler way, they do write like him. It’s Gaiman on the cheap, Gaiman for neophytes, as much as it is preparation to become the next Gaiman.
But I wonder if this confessional form of endorsement, one of candor and small things, also stimulates a parasocial bond. We want to think of celebrities not just as humble, but as our friends. The people I go to for notebook and art book and skincare recommendations are my friends. A good product recommendation, a new thing to buy, is as much a gift between friends as an actual present. Certainly some celebrity gossip bases itself in schadenfreude and our human desire to see trainwrecks, but I think the parasocial impulse powers much of our interactions with celebrities. It’s the reason Teigen’s wine stung so much. Our good friend Teigen had the bad taste of showing off her all-too-good taste.
Just like how we feel we could be friends with the cast of Friends, share an office with the cast of The Office, we want celebrities to provide us the sage product advice that our friends do. Even if we don’t take that advice, if we buy a Moleskin rather than a Leuchtturm, we at least get to feel like they cared about us enough to share their sagacity.
I feel, in all my little consumerist self, hugged and embraced by Gaiman thinking enough about little old me to suggest me a new notebook.
There are of course products that the celebrity can’t live without which will never make an appearance in these annals. Just now I chuckled at the idea of some jokester, say, Jordan Peele or Tim Heidecker, telling his interviewer that his Kaiser Permanente Insurance card is something he could not live without. I know I sure can’t. What about one of those nice credit cards that give great frequent flyer miles? It’s a financial product, but a product nonetheless. And while we have cosmetics, other beautifying measures like plastic surgery, certainly wouldn’t come up: Where’s Simon Cowell’s botox guy?
The Strategist’s commitment to low prices screens a few of these out. But these products suggest a world more dour than an affiliate marketer can comprehend, a world in which companies strategically disenfranchise customers from their marketplace. My Kaiser card comes from my father working for LA County, and in, hypothetically, Peele’s case through the lobbying of the Screen Actor’s Guild and other creative unions (Peele, being a multi-genre creator, likely can pick between Writers Guild of America and the Director’s Guild of America when perusing insurance plans). Our insurance model in America blocks the individual American pretty much wholesale from buying insurance, with employers, unions, and Medicare purchasing insurance for their employees and the elderly. Credit cards come with credit checks that determine the price of our loans and how many points we can get. And larger financial instruments, like the home loans celebrities and the middle class avail themselves of, have a history of redlining.
Which is to say that this tour of celebrity material culture can’t know what to do with the fact that money doesn’t just let you buy more things: it gives you access to new markets, to cheaper prices. Certainly, The Strategist won’t ever show off Louis XV chairs, but what about a prescription for Xanax? It’s $15 for those lucky enough to have great insurance. That’s no luxury. But, for those without the help of the Screen Actor’s Guild and LA County, the self-pay price may make it more akin to luxurious French furniture.
Affiliate marketers are consumerists. They believe in products and in consumption. And while I hesitate to consider consumerism and capitalism as coterminous, the former necessitates belief in the latter. If there’s truly better living through products, if product variety serves as the marked benefit of capitalism, then to have products denied for arbitrary reasons slashes the entire basis of capitalism’s apologia. The affiliate marketer exists to lionize products, but products, immersed in the thorny ethics of capitalism, resist easy celebration. The problem of a Xanax prescription, which very well might be what Jordan Peele could not live without, cannot be solved by an affiliate marketer, and so shall not be entertained. To be as optimistic about products as our affiliate marketers requires not seeing the logistics behind markets, the way that companies withhold their products through price tags and more nefarious mechanisms.
In a way, that’s how we want to see celebrities, too. We want to appreciate Taylor Swift and Kanye West making tunes and duking it out till the world ends without thinking too hard about what these modern times have done to art, that 90% of all Spotify streams (and subsequently revenue) now belong to the top 43,000 musicians leaving the working artist to starve, that West can party on ancestral Lucayan land while the rest of the world fights COVID.
Here, seeing like an affiliate marketer isn’t too different than how we already try to see things. We want products qua products, celebrities qua celebrities, celebrities qua products, class struggle qua nullity.