Are Celebrity Presenters Worth Your Time?
We have reached the point where celebrity speakers are akin to team sports specialists like "closers" in baseball. Eight innings of the game are finished. Now they're brought in to face those last three batters. At the end of the season, they'll be demanding a big payday. The difference is that with speakers, payday is at the end of the night.
Fees have become so large that potential celebrity speakers sign themselves to agencies that specialize in providing someone who come to your gathering and expound. You visit these agencies' sites and the speakers' photos will be laid out for you like used cars. Beneath them will be their various accomplishments or quirks.
The fees might surprise you. A cast member from a popular TV series could cost $10,000 to $15,000. That price might get you a veteran tight end so long as he's not All-Pro, or an astronaut. An astronaut who was an alcoholic till he got religion, however, might run $30,000. Few things add to one's value as a celebrity speaker like overcoming an addiction. People make money merely from being relatives of people who overcame addiction, so long as they're somewhat famous.
Your organization might need to spend between $30,000 and $50,000 for a famous industrialist, or for the star of an old, long-syndicated iconic TV series. At the high end of the price scale comes a certain ex-President of the United States, with a fee of $500,000 or more to grace your event and reminisce.
It's only natural to ask whether it's all worth it. The cost has grown so exorbitant that it might demand a solid, numerical response. A charity or other fund-raising event should be able to determine the value of its $20,000 celebrity quite easily. At the end of the night, it will know whether it raised $20,000 or more than it otherwise would expect. If it did, the charity can reason that the fee was well worth the expense. If not, it can reason otherwise.
Whenever the event is meant to turn a profit, it is capable of such a judgement. If you're holding a baseball collectibles convention, it's easy to determine if it was worth it to pay $100,000 to a three-time MVP when you might've landed last year's batting champ for half that amount. By contrast, it's hard to determine value if the event doesn't have a goal that can be measured in income. That should be a concern, because speakers expect payment in something a lot more fungible than prestige.
A college or university graduation, for example, always features a celebrity speech. One of the staples of these speeches is that in six months no one will remember the speech about to be given. Maybe it's time to takes that to heart, relieve the students of some small amount of their debt, and simply have a successful alumnus from years gone by give the speech. It might in fact mean more to the students.
A conference of businessmen might reconsider the expensive pharmaceuticals CEO whose face graces magazine covers. The mid-level R & D scientist who led the team that designed the breakthrough vaccine might be more inspirational even if he doesn't speak as well. The time might have come to cut down on costs by broadening the field of celebrity speakers.
Blaxploitation
Related Posts
