By Michael Heller, Founder & CEO, Talent Resources
Eighteen years ago, when I started Talent Resources, the celebrity endorsement business ran on a short checklist. Was the talent famous enough? Was the fee in budget? Would the agent return the call? If the answers were yes, you had a deal.
That checklist still works — for a smaller share of the deals worth doing every quarter.
The brand-talent economy of 2026 looks almost nothing like the one that produced the great endorsement campaigns of the 2010s. Audiences fragmented. Tier systems collapsed. A YouTuber can outperform an A-list movie star for some brands and miss badly for others. Athletes became founders. Founders became cultural figures. The line between “celebrity,” “creator,” “athlete,” and “operator” got very blurry, very fast.
The deals that work in this market share a common DNA. They’re built on five questions I didn’t ask in 2007 and ask on every greenlight conversation now.
1. Does the talent have category credibility — or category curiosity?
Category credibility means the talent has shipped, invested, used, or operated in the category for reasons that predate the brand deal. Category curiosity means they’re famous and willing. The first compounds. The second decays. When Eva Longoria became the global face of InMode, the partnership generated more than 3.5 billion media impressions — and it worked because she had a documented relationship with aesthetic medicine before the contract was signed. Curiosity is rentable. Credibility is buildable. Brands should be paying a premium for the latter and a discount for the former.
2. Does the talent own distribution?
The most underweighted variable in modern celebrity deals is distribution ownership. A celebrity with a podcast, a YouTube franchise, or a production company brings a compounding asset to the partnership. A celebrity who relies on third-party media — interviews, broadcast appearances, occasional social posts — brings an expiring one. The research my firm has run with 5W, the AI communications firm, documents this directly: owned platforms surface in AI-driven buyer research at materially higher rates than rented ones. The brand math follows. If the talent owns nothing, you’re paying for borrowed attention.
3. Where does the talent appear in AI-driven research?
Brand marketers in 2026 routinely run shortlist talent through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity before the first agency call. So do consumers researching products. The question is no longer “is this talent famous?” — Google can answer that. The question is, “where does this talent show up when someone asks an AI engine for credible voices in our category?” If the answer is nowhere, the deal is paying for visibility in surfaces that increasingly don’t matter to the buyer journey. This is the work GEO firms now do for talent the same way SEO firms once did it for brands.
4. Is the talent a fit for the next three years, or the next three weeks?
The post-and-pivot era — sign a celebrity, blanket the launch, move on — is producing diminishing returns. Long-term partnerships with cultural figures who grow into a brand outperform short-term endorsements that ride a moment. Dunkin’s relationship with Ben Affleck didn’t start with the Super Bowl spot we brokered with Jennifer Lopez. It started years earlier with paparazzi photos and a cultural inside joke that the brand had the patience to mature into a campaign. Patience is now an asset class.
5. What does the legal look like in three years, not three months?
AI likeness, voice cloning, and deepfake disclosure are reshaping how talent contracts are written. Every deal greenlit in 2026 should include explicit terms on AI usage, training data, and likeness rights — not because every brand will need to enforce them, but because every brand will be operating in a market where talent and consumers expect them. The deals that don’t address this in 2026 are the deals that get renegotiated in 2027.
None of this is theoretical. These are the questions I ask before I commit Talent Resources to a deal, and they are the questions the brands we work with have started asking us back.
The economics of brand-talent partnerships are being rewritten in real time. The teams that ask the right five questions are going to compound. The teams still running the 2007 checklist are going to wonder why the math stopped working.
The good news: the questions are simple. You can run them on any deal sitting on your desk this week.
Michael Heller is the founder and CEO of Talent Resources, a marketing and communications agency he founded in 2007. Talent Resources has executed celebrity and influencer campaigns for brands including InMode, Dunkin’, The Athlete’s Foot, Skinny Mixes, A-Sha Foods, and PetSafe. The firm’s recent work includes Dunkin’s first-ever Super Bowl spot starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, and the InMode global ambassadorship featuring Eva Longoria, which generated more than 3.5 billion media impressions. More at talentresources.com.
