Ellen DeGeneres: Stomach bug has delayed her visit. Photo: Getty Images
TV host Ellen DeGeneres has postponed her first visit to Australia due to illness, leaving the family owned Australian company that is picking up the tab scrambling to reschedule an expensive and high-profile marketing blitz.
Melbourne's Swisse Vitamins had struck a deal to bring DeGeneres and her Australian wife, actress Portia de Rossi, to Melbourne on Sunday and then Sydney later in the week, to promote its large-scale assault on the US market. But DeGeneres dropped a hint to her 17.5 million Twitter followers on Tuesday, saying: ''Trying to get over a bug before I go to Australia. Nobody wants to be down under the weather.''
The US star is now supposed to arrive in Sydney first at some point next week, a Warner Bros statement revealed.
The vitamin company, which had a turnover of about $180 million in 2012, claims it splashed a breathtaking $50 million on a celebrity-studded marketing campaign last year. This year's marketing budget is expected to be at least that again. Swisse has secured Nicole Kidman as its "global ambassador" as well as sponsoring DeGeneres' visit.
Negotiations with Kidman and DeGeneres proceeded in parallel over the past 18 months, and an insider said the key to securing DeGeneres - a huge and highly bankable star in the US - lay in getting Kidman first. Kidman has never endorsed an Australian product before. The actor has signed a three-year contract believed to be worth several million dollars to appear in the company's US ads.
''I joined Swisse because I wanted to help bring awareness to the importance of living a healthy lifestyle in a busy, often stressful world,'' Kidman said. ''I love feeling healthy and fit. They are wonderful attributes of the Australian way of life - and I am a very proud Australian.''
DeGeneres and Kidman are easily the biggest stars in the galaxy of celebrities Swisse has hired to spruik its vitamins in the past few years. They have been unlucky with big name celebrities before, with reality TV star Kim Kardashian famously cancelling her appearance at the Swisse marquee at the 2011 Melbourne Cup due to the trauma of her marriage separation.
The company's brand and media manager Mitch Catlin, who jumped ship from Myer to Swisse in 2011, is credited with much of the celebrity focus, as well as Swisse's increasingly lavish marquees in the Birdcage at Flemington on race days.
Swisse's US calling card was a two-day publicity blitz in Los Angeles in January, where the company sponsored the glitzy G'Day USA ball with Qantas and orchestrated Kidman's appearance on an Australia-themed episode of DeGeneres' show.
Swisse was founded by Kevin Ring in 1972 as an organic bakery that also sold pollen tablets as a health tonic - its first vitamin product. The company, which enjoys about an 11 per cent share of the growing vitamin and herbals market in Australia, is now controlled by Mr Ring's son Stephen, with chief executive Radek Sali and former chief executive Michael Saba holding minority shares. Analysts say Swisse is growing at about 5 per cent or 6 per cent a year.
But Swisse has also drawn criticism from some health professionals for offering incentives in the form of free complementary medicine courses to doctors who on-sell its multivitamins, and attracted the attention of a Therapeutic Goods Administration panel for its health claims.
No comments:
Post a Comment