Paula Deen’s business unravelling as sponsors flee

With her recent firing by Wal-Mart, Sears, Target, Home Depot, Caesar’s Entertainment, drug maker Novo Nordisk and QVC, the home shopping channel, to name just a few, Paula Deen reminds us that the celebrity-sponsorship game is a baffling business.

And that’s describing it charitably.

There’s no mystery in any of the firings, of which Deen is only the latest in a long line of exceedingly dubious celebs to be quickly dumped when their cynicism becomes so noxious that it threatens to spill over and stain the good name of their sponsor. In Deen’s case, of course, it was her acknowledgment during a lawsuit hearing that she had used the n-word on more than one occasion in the past.

News of her admission immediately garnered headlines, and within days the deep-fried-cooking queen was dropped by the Food Network, starting a cascade of ripped-up endorsement deals, each one shredding another slice off of her US$17-million annual income.

It’s believed that losing Food Network’s backing alone will cost Deen US$2.5 million . Her now-severed Smithfield Foods contract, the most lucrative of her 17 sponsorships, was reported to be worth up to US$2-million a year.

In total, it’s estimated that Deen’s ill-chosen words will reduce her earnings by as much US$10-million annually.

As said, there’s no mystique there. That’s just math. The deeply unclear component is why companies are so cavalier when picking spokespeople for their brands in the first place?

The pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, a leading producer of diabetes medications, signed Deen to a US$6-million deal last year to shill for its Victoza drug. Now obviously it’s in Novo Nordisk’s best interests for more people to need diabetes medication, but how desperately cynically do you have to be to sponsor a star who has built her entire celebrity around extolling the splendors of bacon-wrapped, deep-friend macaroni-and-cheese, and other calorie bombs, all of which are among the most damaging dishes anyone with diabetes should eat.

And if you were fine with that, given the new business it would drum up, but just couldn’t abide Deen’s racial language, why not question the deal nine months ago, when she appeared on a New York Times video, and referring to her driver and bodyguard as being “black as that board”, before beckoning him to move away from the backdrop off-stage, saying “We can’t see you standing against that dark board.”

Had any of the companies now clamoring for the high ground, in a bid to separate themselves from the toxic presence that is Paula Deen, that would have been the time to move.