For those of you wondering how Lindsay Lohan could possibly get her career back on track and win back the hearts and minds of the American people … well, she can’t. Or at least, she can, but she won’t be around to actually enjoy the fame. According to author Jo Piazza in his new book Celebrity, Inc. the only way Lindsay could possibly rejuvenate her career would be to go full on Marilyn Monroe and die young. No, seriously. Via Gawker:
In just six years, Lohan had gone from being an asset on a project to being a liability. The press has always claimed her sloppy and seemingly drug-addled behavior makes her unbankable and uninsurable. Neither of those claims is accurate. The dirty secret of Hollywood brand management is that no one is unbankable or uninsurable; there is always money and there are always projects for a celebrity brand that is likable and consistent. Lohan had become unlikable and inconsistent. That’s why no one wanted to work with her.
[…] Q scores help to determine an actor and actresses likability so that studios know whether consumers will see a project. One of the reasons Lohan had difficulty getting work after 2007, and why in 2010 she was dropped from the Lovelace biopic, is that her Q scores were some of the worst that the overseer of the metric, Steve Levitt of Marketing Evaluations, has seen over his entire forty-year career.
[…] With each of Lohan’s inconsistent brand decisions, the gap between her positive and negative Q scores widened. After her arrests and subsequent rehabilitations, Lohan’s Q again fell in 2007. With 74 percent brand awareness, she had a positive rating of 11 and a negative rating of 43. Her failed relationship with Samantha Ronson, as well as her nude photo-shoot in New York magazine, increased her awareness score to 80 percent in 2008, while her positive rating remained an 11. Her negative rating, however, shot up to a 52. By any objective standard of accounting,Lohan was getting more famous and more unlikable. By 2010, 84 percent of those polled were familiar with Lohan. And yet her positive rating reached a new low of 9, her negative rating remaining at 52. More than five times as many people disliked Lohan as liked her.
“Michael Jackson had Qs in that range for a long time,” Levitt explained to me. Almost as an afterthought he added, “His stats only went up after he died.”
[…] The death bump happened for Michael Jackson as well. In February 2006, Michael Jackson’s positive Q score was a 9 and his negative was a 67. According to Levitt, that was a historical low within the entire celebrity population. But by November 2009, five months after his death, Jackson’s positive Q had skyrocketed to a 34 and his negative Q had dropped to a 27. It was an unprecedented turnaround, played to the sound of dinging cash registers. With likability comes marketability.
Remember a week or so ago, I joked about how it’s gotten to the point where the only way LiLo can hang with a celebrity is if their dead? Turns out I may have been just a little too on the mark; she actually has to literally die. So I guess Lindsay has only two options: either live a normal life, or live no life at all.