Black-ish star Anthony Anderson is getting into the advertising… uh, business-ish. With his eight-season run as an ad exec on the hit ABC comedy in the rearview, the actor and entrepreneur made his inaugural trip to CES in Las Vegas to debut an all-new adventure, ADvolution.
“It’s life imitating art,” Anderson told an enthusiastic audience during an ADWEEK House panel where he and his business partner Alex Chatfield unveiled the celebrity-forward adtech business. (Chatfield is the company’s co-founder president, alongside co-founder and CEO Marc Mordoh.) “Hopefully, I don’t embarrass myself for the company that we’ve started!”
It’s safe to say that ADvolution fared better with the CES crowd than Kangaroo Jack did with film critics. Inspired in part by Anderson’s own experience as a veteran Hollywood presence with a loyal fanbase and a myriad of brand partnerships, the company seeks to be the conduit between a diverse roster of celebrities and the digital advertising industry.
“The mission of ADvolution is to enable actors, musicians, and athletes to galvanize their social media platform and use that in conjunction with partnerships in the ad world,” emphasized Anderson. “The industry is at an inflection [point] right now—things are vastly different than they were 10 years ago.”
Media matters
Chief among those current inflections is the fact that social media platforms have recast celebrities in the role of—as Chatfield put it—“their own media networks.” And just like legacy media networks, from ABC to TLC, stars have access to often granular data about their followers and fans courtesy of those platforms that they can bring to interested brands.
“It enables brands to get very targeted and focused on a curated community of people,” Chatfield noted. “The idea of delivering an ad to your spokesperson’s fanbase … [means] that people actually tune in and listen. You break through the noise.”
Anderson and Chatfield see ADvolution’s role in this brave new world as a curation driver, using its technology to target advertising opportunities that benefit brands, celebrities, and fans alike. Those opportunities will go beyond traditional partnership deals to more specific experiences. And for celebrities that already have brand partnerships in place, ADvolution would seek to expand their participation into new arenas.
“Beyond just being in the commercial, [they are] now helping distribute the commercial,” Chatfield said by way of example, adding that the company is currently focused on recruiting “more established” celebrities. He also distinguished ADvolution’s services from what creators might provide, citing Anderson’s brand partnerships as their preferred model.
