One week ago, a rumor rumbled on the celebrity-meets-fashion fault line: Selena Gomez, singer and ex-Disney star, had signed a deal with Coach, American luxury leather goods company. The rumor, which Page Six initially reported, became fact five days later when Coach made its new relationship status with Gomez official via a press release. The brand did not disclose the terms of the agreement, such as the star's paycheck—which had been rumored to be $10 million—or its duration. It did discuss the innovative deal Gomez had managed to strike: she'll be collaborating on a "special design project," helping the brand launch a partnership with the female-empowerment organization Step Up, and will be the face of Coach's fall campaign. At the age of 24, Selena Gomez is already tailoring her multi-million-dollar endorsement deals to fit her own agenda. How did she manage this?
"She's been able to stay relatively drama-free, and brand safety is always an important thing when you're looking at these types of brand ambassador deals," Krishna Subramanian, a co-founder of Captiv8 (a company that connects brands to digital influencers), told Vanity Fair on a recent phone call. He added that her squeaky-clean image and long-term commitment to brands are what make her so incredibly attractive to them. "It's one of these ideal situations where her audience realizes if she's endorsing something, it's done at a deep level. Of course every [brand] would want that. That's the holy grail."
Coach is the most recent in a string of enormous sponsorship deals Gomez entered in 2016. (She declined to comment on this story.) Gomez is now associated with Coca-Cola, Verizon, Louis Vuitton, and Pantene, among others. These brands span distinct sectors and are each at the top of their game; what Gomez brings, even after she took off a quarter of this year, is one part social-media ascendency, one part offline success, one part post-Disney squeaky-clean image (a commitment to the fans who have remained faithful all these years, of which brands want a part), and one part high-fashion credits.
Insta-power
You may have heard about the two superlatives Gomez achieved on Instagram this year: first, at 105 million followers, she's the most followed person on the platform. (For comparison, her friend Taylor Swift has 94.8 million followers and Rihanna has 47 million.) And second, she has the most liked picture of 2016. Posted on behalf of Coca-Cola, the photo is a simple shot of her holding a bottle of Coke with the lyrics to a song of hers on it. The photo received 6 million likes, despite being an ad.
In September, Vanity Fair reported that one of her posts is said to be "worth" around $550,000, and sources revealed that the star definitely has professional photographers shooting some of her content. This doesn't seem to detract from the image of authenticity she's projecting to her target demographic. It might help that, as Gomez told The Hollywood Reporter in July, she doesn't have a social-media consultant.
Brands and her core followers are clearly buying into what Gomez is putting out. Beyond just having the most, she has an appealing audience of potential customers: millennial women. Eighteen- to 20-year-olds make up the highest percentage of her followers—about 22 percent of them, according to data pulled by Captiv8. Around half of her followers are female and between the ages 18 and 35. For brands like Coach, Louis Vuitton, and Pantene, this is the sweetest spot.
Consistently committed
Gomez's sponsors have not always been the crème de la crème of globally recognized brands, but they were in line with her image as the star of Disney Channel's The Wizards of Waverly Place. Between 2009 and 2014, she endorsed everything from Sears and Borden Milk (appearing in print and television ads for both) to Adidas Neo, her first major sponsorship deal to come when she began her career as a pop star in earnest. She also had the requisite eponymous lines: fragrances (which are still available), nail polish, and clothing.
Though she's managed to sharpen the prestige of her deals, there's a common thread in all of them: long-term commitment (as in more than a year). Unlike Kim Kardashian West and her sisters or any number of "influencers" on down the line, Gomez rarely enters into one-off deals, or a couple of posts and a single payday. She's in it for the long haul, and most brands prefer a steady investment.
Becoming high-fashion famous
To go from Kmart to Coach took a little re-imaging, and a large piece of that had to do with her stylist Kate Young. Young made a push to put Gomez in high-fashion clothes, name-checking Valentino, Saint Laurent, Givenchy, and of-the-moment brand Monse in interviews. The intent seemed to balance her perpetual baby face with a classic adult aesthetic and grow her Disney Channel roots into her pop-star present. It worked. After Gomez attended the Met Gala with Louis Vuitton's creative director, Nicolas Ghesquière, in May, the brand announced that she would be its face. She embraced the high-fashion community, and they embraced her—and her 105 million Instagram followers—right back.
Absence-proof—to a certain extent
Just as Gomez's fashion tastes were changing, so was her social-media approach. It was only after she slowed her posting cadence that she hit her record-breaking highs. Captiv8's data on the account shows that she significantly reduced the number of photos she shared on Instagram per day between 2014 and 2015. In 2016, however, everything changed.
On August 30, she announced that she would taking "some time off" to be "proactive" about dealing with the "side effects of lupus" in a statement released to People. She never said how long her time off would last, but she remained off of Instagram for 14 weeks. Just prior to ghosting this and other platforms, she had allegedly gotten into a public word scuffle on Instagram with her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber. This—this—was her biggest recent controversy, and a perfect microcosm of how she remains a fairly safe bet for brands even when she's absent from the lives of the customers they hope to reach.
When Gomez returned to the Instagram on November 25, she posted a photo with her fans, captioned, "I have a lot to be thankful for this year. My year has been the hardest yet most rewarding one yet. I've finally fought the fight of not 'being enough.'" It got 3.8 million likes, par for the course on her account. Her next photo, posted this weekend, is of the singer holding a Coach bag personalized with her initials. It currently has 3.5 million likes. It's as if she never left, and brands, fans, and followers alike adore her for it.
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