The company was T-Mobile, and their uninspired claim was "Get more." Well, Ms. Zeta-Jones certainly got more. $9,000,000 a year for five years to be specific.

Beautiful.  Stylish.  Ineffective.  After spending $45 million with Catherine Zeta Jones as a spokesperson and never achieving more than a 10% market share, T-Mobile has dropped her for a "more man on the street" approach.How 'bout T-Mobile? What did they get for their $45,000,000 talent payment? High recall of Ms. Zeta-Jones and low results for their brand. They've never grown beyond a 10% share of the U.S. market.

Not surprising. Commercials with celebrity endorsers almost always get very high recall.

Of the celebrity.

And they seldom produce positive bottom-line results for the advertiser.

Peyton Manning is as talented a spokesperson as he is a quarterback. His self-effacing delivery is incredibly good. The result? His spots get tremendous awareness. Their "most liked" scores" are through the roof. And they don't impact sales. We recently saw data on a long-running campaign featuring #18, and it was true to the pattern. Tremendous recall. Absolutely no effect on purchase intent.

The "Got Milk" campaign has achieved near-universal awareness. It has featured more than 200 leading lights of film, TV and sports, and still counting. Even the photographer, Annie Leibowitz, is a celebrity in her own right. It's hard to imaging a more beautifully-produced campaign. The photos are perfect. The celebrities stellar. The layout is clean and arresting. The line simple and easily understood.

And the results have been dismal. The "Got Milk" campaign has not slowed the slide in milk consumption one bit, much less increased sales.

In addition to being a marketplace failure, the "Got Milk" campaign highlights another peril of celebrity endorsers. As anyone who's exposed to mass media knows, celebrities are notoriously fickle. It's not just Brad with Jennifer and then Angelina. Or Ben with Gwyneth and then J-Lo. Or Pam with, then without, then once again with, Kid Rock.

Milk endorsers are not always loyal to the bovine beverage. Jennifer Anniston also shills for Heineken. Britney Spears has got both milk and Pepsi. Kim Cattrall appears in ads for milk, Pepsi and Bacardi. Christy Brinkley, milk and Anheuser-Busch. David Beckham, milk and Pepsi. And the list goes on.

Of course the milk mustache celebrities aren't the only product spokespeople sending out mixed messages. Heather Locklear has endorsed both Coke and Pepsi. Jason Alexander has appeared in commercials for McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Cheryl Ladd did two competing shampoos. Farrah Fawcett is probably the conflicting endorsements poster girl. Among her dozens of advertising gigs, she's been a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society and Winchester cigarettes, three competing shampoos and two different lines of jewelry.

Would you want your daughter to grow up like Britney now?  This "Got Milk" ad was from 2000.Conflicts are a potential embarrassment. Felony arrests and overdose deaths are potential disasters. Although the sexual assault charge against Kobe Bryant was dropped, his admission of adultery and a reported large cash settlement to his accuser made him a liability rather than an asset to McDonalds, Nike, Upper Deck and Sprite, who together were paying him about $20,000,000 a year at the time. Anna Nicole Smith's overdose death was regrettable in many ways. One was for TrimSpa, the weight-loss pill she endorsed.

The brutal cost of celebrity endorsements is another tremendous liability.

Miller Beer's "Man Law" campaign featured Burt Reynolds, Jerome Bettis, Oscar de la Hoya, Jimmy Johnson, WWE's Mr. H, rodeo champion Ty Murray and a whole glass cube full of macho celebrities. The talent cost probably approached Bolivia's national budget, and the campaign failed so badly that the agency which created it, Crispin Porter+Bogusky, resigned the account in embarrassment.

Madonna got $12,000,000 for endorsing Versace's 2005 spring line. Not the whole year, mind you. Just spring.

Celine Dion's $14,000,000 stint as Chrysler's spokes-singer was such a total disaster that it was killed one year into a projected three-year run.

Sarah Jessica Parker got $38,000,000 for a three-year deal with the Gap. Results were so bad her replacement, Joss Stone, was announced after just a year.

And those are just the talent costs. With that much money in front of the camera, it's only natural to go first class in production, too. Robert De Niro's commercial for American Express was directed by Martin Scorcese. Our minds simply boggle at the probable budget for that spot. And, of course, if you're spending millions on talent and millions more (literally) for production, it wouldn't make sense to skimp on media.

And all this for campaigns that almost never work.

Why? One reason is that – amazingly – advertisers sometimes don't measure the bottom-line benefit of their advertising. Another is that some client and agency folks are star-struck, and love hanging out with big-name talent, if only for a day on the set. A third is that sometimes – not often – celebrity campaigns work. Just as the announcement of a big lottery prize makes millions of luckless ticket buyers forget the abysmal odds against winning, the occasional successful celebrity endorsement campaign makes some folks think – irrationally – that they'll score big with celebrity ads of their own.

And it sometimes happens.

It works for cosmetics. Christy Brinkley has sold truckloads of Cover Girl. Halle Berry and Susan Sarandon move Revlon by the ton. A BrainPosse principal used to do L'Oréal commercials and can attest to the fact that celebrities sell hair treatment. Michael Jordan sold a heck of a lot of sneakers. Kirstie Alley was effective for Jenny Craig (though not for Pier One Imports).  Home furnishings is another area where celebrities have been effective, such as Alex Karras for

La-Z-Boy or Johnny Unitas for Berkline. 

The common thread to success:  The celebrities are relevant to the brands they're selling. Women whose business is their beauty are convincing (not just memorable) spokespeople for cosmetics. Sports stars have cred for athletic gear. A former fat lady is a believable endorser for a weight-loss program. And ex-jocks just look right in recliners. They're not just famous people holding up and pointing to products with which they have no real connection, in fields in which they have no expertise.

So, like winning the lottery, it can be done. And, like playing the lottery, the odds are astronomically against coming out ahead.

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