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Hawking Hawking E-Trade?
I may be hallucinating, but I think a commercial just led me to believe that Bob Dylan, Arthur Ashe, Ernest Hemingway, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Vince Lombardi, and Stephen Hawking think I should invest with E-Trade. Apparently the ad debuted back in March, but this was my first viewing. Students of advertising: What is the process to obtain permission to use footage of such luminaries? Students of the end of civilization as we know it: Where are we, countdown-wise?
Posted by Jack Silbert on 11/08/2005 | Permalink
Comments
I wonder if it has anything to do w/ companies like Getty or Bill Gate's Corbis who have a large archive of photography and film. I guess the celebs don't have the right to not have their images used from archival footage that's owned by someone else? The footage seemed pretty old and low quality, so maybe it was cheap to obtain? Enless of course they came back from the grave and authorized endorsement.
Posted by: Blucheez | Nov 9, 2005 7:26:54 AM
I guess the celebs don't have the right to not have their images used from archival footage that's owned by someone else?
That is certainly not true. Those people have publicity rights in their own images; if they were used, they were paid.
Posted by: Charles Star | Nov 9, 2005 10:33:23 AM
As Charles suggests, there are two main sets of rights in play here: publicity rights and copyrights. I'm not a lawyer, but from what I've read, if the ad portrays a public figure with a product or in any suggests an implied endorsement, they not only need to license the copyrights for any media of said figure, they need publicity rights as well. Publicity rights of dead famous people are generally controlled by their estates.
Posted by: carrie | Nov 9, 2005 11:54:22 AM
For those who haven't seen the spot: I don't want to give the impression that it implicity states, "Bob Dylan uses E-Trade." The gist is, each image is introduced with "No one ever said they wanted to be an ordinary singer/writer/tennis player....so why would you want to be an ordinary investor." Apple has used similar tactics, and i think the Gap as well?
Posted by: Jack Silbert | Nov 9, 2005 12:40:53 PM
Yeah, it's not like a direct endorsement, more of a "These people are trend setters, and so are we." Maybe they did get paid. Didn't MLK jr's estate authorize those ridiculous I have a dream ads?
Posted by: Blucheez | Nov 9, 2005 3:11:38 PM
MLK's estate would authorize a Strom Thurmond campaign ad, if they got paid for it. (Well, they would have. When he was, you know, alive.)
But not a documentary about MLK, which can't pay squat.
Posted by: editor | Nov 9, 2005 5:05:19 PM
