Looking for a handout
In an office above an Encino strip mall, the floor is covered with swag. Tumi luggage, Armani cologne, stacks of Sebastian Trucco makeup, Cricket Cola cases, piles of wee baby T-shirts and CD cases, baskets full of hair-care products, towers of Altoid tins and Balance bars and coffee mugs and surfboard wax.
This is the newly opened West Coast office of the New York-based Buzz Bags, and items covering the floor are mostly remnants of their latest big project: gift bags for the Women’s Tennis Assn. Championship Finals. Participants received, among most of the items mentioned above, a $2,500 gift certificate for laser hair removal by a top Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon.
“They went berserk,” says Debbie Flesch, who along with Sandy Reed runs the L.A. office. “[Winner] Kim Clijsters took one look at the bag and I thought she was going to cry. The woman had just won a million dollars and a Porsche and she was just delirious over our bag. It’s crazy, but it happens all the time.”
“All the time” is not an overstatement. Long, long ago in this kingdom by the sea, gift bags were the accouterment of two arenas: high-priced charity dinners (at which attendees might receive a Barneys key chain or a silver-plate picture frame as a thank-you) and press events -- magazine launches, record releases, movie premieres that ended with the ubiquitous paper sack full of the ubiquitous T-shirt, CD and, if you were lucky, Godiva chocolate samples.
Now, they have become a standard part of every high-end event, from the Oscars to the U.S. Open, from the Carousel of Hope Ball to private dinner parties. Now, a list of Emmy or Grammy nominees is followed moments later by a rundown of the contents of the gift bags to be collected by the awards presenters. Now, celebrities call party planners in advance to find out what’s in the gift bag, and social doyennes regularly help themselves to two or three “for my friends in the car.”
People who once began an evening wondering who they would leave with spend the party in delicious anticipation of what they will leave with.
Gift bags have grown in girth as well as number, and so has the spillover -- tennis players receiving thousands of dollars’ worth of non-sports-related items is just the beginning. No longer a glittery, gushing star-schmooze, gift bags in the past few years have become a strategic marketing tool. Companies vie for the opportunity to donate products -- and, usually, pay a fee to be included in the bag -- because it is cost-effective advertising. And if this trend follows the standard celebrity trickle-down patterns, gift bags will be soon be as standard a staple at Debbie’s graduation party as Chardonnay and baked Brie.
Buzz generators
“Gift bags are about generating word of mouth,” says Scott Donaton, the editor of Advertising Age. “And word of mouth is the latest, biggest trend in advertising. It’s just exploding.”
In making his own social rounds in New York, Donaton has been handed parting gifts at fashion shows, book signings and private dinner parties. Part of this, he says, is the result of a general blurring of social and business activity -- increasingly, people are padding their guest lists with high-profile types and then persuading companies to underwrite the festivities. Gift bags, he says, are the purest vehicle for generating buzz in a consumer audience that has become increasingly fragmented and distrustful of advertising itself.
“If you can put your product into the hands of people who get the word out, that’s implied endorsement,” Donaton says. “It means more if a friend tells you something is good than if an ad tells you.”
Your budget might not cover a celebrity spokesperson, he adds, “but if you have a celebrity photographed with your phone or your watch, that’s even better because people won’t think you paid for it.”
But “celebrity” is slowly being replaced by “trendsetter.” With six years in the gift-bag industry, Dennis Lumpkin is perhaps its eminence grise. An event producer for Sequoia Productions, which puts together the Governors Ball at the Oscars, he may well be the person most responsible for the gift-bagging of America. In the mid-’90s, Oscar gift baskets were put together to get presenters to actually attend the rehearsals. It was Lumpkin who suggested that the Emmys follow suit. He still works both gigs, but his last project was a basket for Michael Jordan’s basketball camp. It was attended by the rich and unfamous, but Lumpkin had no problem getting plenty of high-end free stuff.
“Now we’re seeing people who don’t want to give to celebrities,” Lumpkin says. “They figure celebrities get too much stuff. So instead they want to target corporate types. That way, the products stand out more.”
It’s no wonder that in the past few years, an industry of gift bag creators, like Buzz Bags, has popped up like so many Santa’s elves.
When Lash Fary and his partner started Distinctive Assets four years ago, they were the only game in town. The only gift bags worth talking about were the Oscars’, which were done in-house. Now, he says, he hears about new companies all the time, and the near-ubiquitousness of gift bags adds a note of tension to his job.
“So many new companies up the ante,” he says, which creates a nearly insatiable media appetite for gift lists. “The press just freaks out about it each year -- what’s the value, what’s the wow -- so it has to keep getting higher to keep them interested. And now you have people who want gift bags for weddings, bar mitzvahs, baby showers, Super Bowl parties.”
Gift bags, Fary says, make people feel as though they are, if not celebrities, then at least part of the inner circle. A circle that is ever widening.
Buzz Bags began when its founders decided to put gift bags on the jitney that runs from New York City to the Hamptons -- getting to a social elite that might never see a red carpet. Since then, they have bagged Donald Trump’s private box seats at the U.S. Open; Meryl Streep’s birthday party; the opening of Rosie O’Donnell’s Broadway show, “Taboo”; as well as working with the Ellen DeGeneres show.
They bill their company not as gift consultants but as a direct advertising and product placement service.
“Gift bags are really just the next step in niche advertising,” Flesch says. “We put products right into the hands of a select elite demographic. It’s win, win.”
Win, win, win, with the last victors being the companies that create the bags. Four or five years ago, most luxury goods manufacturers had never heard of gift bags. “When I started calling around,” Fary says, “people just laughed. Give stuff to celebrities? And pay a fee to do it?”
Now Fary can barely walk through his office, there is so much loot sent with desperate pleas for his approval.
“Budgets are developed with gift bags in mind,” says Marie Griffin, who, through her New York company Griffin Marketing & P.R., reps clients including Clark Shoes and Hello Kitty. She says she encourages all her clients to participate in gifting opportunities because “it’s an integral part of advertising on every level.”
Why? She offers this example: At last year’s Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Awards, Griffin says, Cameron Diaz was wearing a Hello Kitty necklace when she was photographed for the first time with current beau Justin Timberlake.
“Now that is the picture that everyone uses when they write about their relationship,” Griffin says. “You cannot put a price on that kind of exposure.”
Lumpkin remembers when, a few years back, he included Moonstone chocolate in a gift bag for an event attended by Oprah Winfrey. Oprah, who has all but turned her show into an on-air gift bag with few audience members leaving the studio empty-handed, liked the chocolate so much, she mentioned it on her show. Within minutes, Lumpkin says, the company had so much business it could not fill all the orders.
“In today’s economy, when ad budgets are being cut, we’re all looking to get our product out there in a unique way,” says Arianna Brooke, marketing director of The Sak, which produces a line of purses and wallets. A year ago, The Sak decided to make gift bags a “strategic and consistent” portion of its marketing plan. Although the trend is too new for anyone to have hard budget numbers, people in and watching the advertising business agree that gift bags are on their way to gaining a separate budgetary line item.
“Companies are shifting their money around,” says Pam Danziger, president of Unity Marketing, a research firm that specializes in luxury goods. “Where once gift bags would be considered charitable contributions, now they are part of the advertising budget.”
Danziger calls gift bags “sampling at its finest” and says they are the tip of a new marketing iceberg because gifts offer a rare opportunity for manufacturers to touch two markets -- the giver and the receiver. Or in the case of gift bags, the giver, the receiver, their personal assistants, spouses, neighbors and housekeepers. This, she says, makes gift bags a fine example of trickle-down luxury, both figurative and literal.
“The evolution of all luxury goods is that they get interpreted down to the masses,” she says. “Soon part of throwing a suburban dinner party will be the cost of a gift bag.”
More than a mere bag
As gift bags have become an advertising keystone, their creation has grown more complicated -- especially at the high end of the industry. There are now exclusivity agreements -- there will be only one makeup line, only one brand of alcohol -- and the mix of items is expected to reflect not just the event but the personality of the special guests. “If you think just anyone can throw one of these things together,” Lumpkin says, “you’re wrong.”
Not only do gift-bag magnates constantly scan stores, homes and magazines for new merchandise, they grill publicists, read up on celebrities and just plain spy. “We happened to overhear one of the tennis players saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we never had to shave again?’ ” Flesch says of the WTA bag. “And so the laser hair removal was perfect.”
Those who regularly receive gift bags have also become accidental consultants, she adds. “We’ll have companies call us because a celebrity came into their store and said, ‘Oh, this is so great, you should try to get it into a gift bag.’ ”
Karen Wood has taken that kind of research and relationship one step further. After 10 years as a talent coordinator for the Oscars and other awards shows, she says, she “realized there are certain limitations with gift baskets and the anonymity of giving.”
First she got rid of the term “gift bag” in favor of “gift collection.” “How many of them actually fit in a bag anymore?” she says. Her company, Backstage Creations, creates “celebrity retreats” backstage at awards show and other events. In these posh environments, celebrities not only choose their own personal “gift collection” from an assortment of high-end items and on-site services (spa treatments, for example), they can talk to representatives of the various companies, who are able to glean information about how their product is perceived and have their picture taken with Halle Berry.
Marketing wise, Wood says, it’s a no-brainer. And the celebrities and VIPs love it because “this way, instead of giving them a watch they might not like, they can pick it themselves.”
Which must be a huge relief. Because while the horrifying possibility of there being no gift bag has mercifully decreased, there’s always a chance you might get something you already have.
