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hot in Hollywood
Looking for a product endorser? Get Q Scores.
By Jamie Jones
It’s very easy to find out which movies and TV shows are popular. Box office figures and Nielsen ratings tell us that.
It's also easy to learn which stars of which movies are hot. Just look at the covers of People and Us magazines.
But as with shows, so it is with stars, the idea of hot is plagued by nuances. And for stars those nuances are not measured in any sort of public way, the way ratings are for TV shows.
Who is hot hot hot? Who is sort of hot? Who was hot last week but out of mind this week?
For that matter, who is hot with the over-65 set but Nowheresville among teens?
The answers are a lot harder to come by. You have to get your hands on those stars' Q Scores, as they are known. You'll pay handsomely too.
Q Scores are compiled by Marketing Evaluations Inc., a Long Island-based research firm.
Q Scores measure the familiarity and appeal of everything famous: movie stars, TV actors, shows, brands, sports personalities and so on.
The scores are especially attractive to advertisers in search of a sponsor for a product.
"From where we sit, there’s no mystique about it. It’s basically a database," says Henry Schafer, executive vice president of Marketing Evaluations.
Though it's America’s ultimate popularity contest, certainly when it comes to the stars, the study's results are closely guarded and kept out of the press.
"We used to put out press releases to generate interest, but as the study evolved into its place in the industry, it wasn’t necessary to generate that interest. It did it on its own," says Schafer.
In addition to advertisers looking for a spokesperson, Q Scores' buyers also include talent agencies, public relations firms and television and movie producers, says Schafer.
The most famous set of scores are the Performer Q Scores, which chart the familiarity and appeal of personalities.
But Q Scores also track the familiarity and appeal of television programs, children’s products, internet sites, sports personalities and product brands.
Depending on the category, Marketing Evaluations conducts field research between one and four times per year with 1,800 to 4,500 participants.
Research usually takes the form of self-completed questionnaires or interviews.
Seemingly the only requirement of subjects is that they be over the age of six.
Who gets on the questionnaire is largely a question of whether anyone wants to know. Client requests are responsible for generating 90 percent of the names on the questionnaire list, says Schafer.
The other 10 percent of the questionnaire consists of personalities, programs, TV shows, video games or other products that Marketing Evaluations wants to watch.
That’s because Q Scores keep track of celebrities for the long haul. The ratings system has been around for 37 years, long enough to track the rise and fall of nearly two generations of celebrities.
And while some celebrities seem to predictably end up on the list where you'd think, there are a lot of surprises that have come up over the years.
A decade ago, in 1990, one might have been surprised to learn that actress Jeanne Cooper and actor Bill Cosby had higher Q Scores than Harrison Ford or Tom Hanks.
Bill Cosby garnered a Q Score of 52. Compare that to Cooper’s 44, Ford’s 41, and Hanks’s 40.
And while the celebrities may change rankings, the system does not change, relying on a consistent set of values to determine celebrity.
Each score is derived from a set of numbers that represents the celebrity’s overall familiarity and appeal.
The familiarity quotient is fairly straightforward: It measures how many people are familiar with the celebrity.
The appeal factor is assessed through four criteria: whether the personalities are among the consumer’s top-10 favorite celebrities, whether their appeal is very good, good, or fair/poor.
The relationship between the familiarity and the appeal factors is slippery.
It may be that as a celebrity’s familiarity grows, so does his or her Q Score.
But, Schafer says, if the celebrity’s familiarity grows and his or her appeal gets worse, then the Q Score becomes lower.
Schafer also urges clients to pay close attention to a celebrity’s rankings in the "fair/poor" appeal category.
"We keep clients focused on the negative end of the scale," he says.
"You don’t want to deal with a personality that is polarizing. But in some cases it’s good, if you want to create a lot of anxiety or awareness in your project or campaign."
Clients use Q Scores in two major ways: to find spokespeople or to generate ad campaigns.
First, clients look at the demographics. Who’s popular and well-liked among the demographic they want to reach?
But secondly, and perhaps even more crucially, who makes sense as a credible spokesperson for the product?
"You don’t want to have celebrities representing products that there’s no reason for them to represent," says Schafer.
"For example, you wouldn’t want Madonna pitching a retirement fund."
Madonna may be popular among many of the consumers who are in the market for a retirement fund, but the Material Girl doesn’t exactly exude a sense of prudent financial planning.
Marketing Evaluations consults clients on matching personalities with brands.
And here the numbers tend to mean not all that much. Brand compatibility, unlike celebrity, is still unquantifiable.
November 5, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jamie Jones is a staff writer for Media Life.
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