- Tension: A charismatic CEO can win headlines with a single endorsement choice, yet that same instinctive pick can quietly drain millions when the data says audiences don’t care.
- Noise: Industry lore glorifies the gut-feel “big splash”—the Super-Bowl-ad cameo, the red-carpet selfie—while dashboards full of sentiment and fit scores sit ignored in cloud folders.
- Direct Message: Visibility is leverage only when it’s aligned; leaders who marry personal vision with empirical audience fit don’t just buy attention—they compound trust.
Read more about our approach → The Direct Message methodology.
The first time Janet Comenos sat across a Fortune 500 CMO, she didn’t pitch software. She asked a question that felt almost impolite: “Do you know how much of last year’s celebrity spend actually moved hearts, not just vanity metrics?”
The exec shuffled a stack of brand-lift reports, half proud, half uneasy. Everyone in the room understood the subtext: what had glittered on Instagram might have corroded quietly in the margins no slide deck shows.
Comenos, now CEO of Spotted, occupies an unusual perch. She sells predictive intelligence on talent-brand alignment, but her origin story isn’t a STEM fairy tale. She spent her early twenties inside marketing departments that treated endorsement deals like creative trophies.
One campaign paired a luxury watch with a bankable action hero because, as the CFO bragged, “He wears our product off-set already.”
Post-launch tracking told a different story: female purchase intent fell, and Gen Z mocked the spot as “dad flex.” The brand doubled down, bought more media, and called it awareness.
That friction — image versus effect—follows anyone tasked with allocating seven-figure influencer budgets. The numbers are sobering: nearly half of consumers surveyed in 2023 could not name the face of a sneaker brand they’d scrolled past all year.
Yet the deals keep growing, propelled by executives who assume fame travels on contact, like static electricity. It is tempting to believe a star’s glow will spill onto a logo by osmosis. Comenos’ rise suggests the opposite: glow is refracted, not absorbed, unless the frequencies match.
She tells the story of a beverage client courting a Grammy winner whose fan base leaned heavily coastal and under twenty-five. Spotted’s model flagged a mismatch: the brand’s fastest-growing segment was Midwestern parents looking for low-sugar alternatives. Data recommended a country star with half the Instagram followers but triple the relevance index.
Leadership balked — until a tiny A/B test, one zip-code cluster, showed the lower-profile talent lifting coupon redemption by 18 percent. The bigger name drew likes, not carts.
Those tests rarely make headlines, but they reshape balance sheets. They also flip the script on what “leadership visibility” means. In a media cycle that rewards viral declarations, Comenos practices a subtler authority: ask the embarrassing question, then measure the answer. Her clients discover that bravery looks less like rolling dice on household names and more like admitting you might not be the demo you serve.
The Direct Message
The future of brand strategy belongs to leaders who treat visibility as a hypothesis—validated not by applause in the boardroom but by resonance in the wild.
From that premise, several patterns emerge:
1) The myth of the founder’s favorite.
A CEO enamored with a childhood sports idol forgets that nostalgia skews older than the brand’s growth cohort. Data shows correlation gaps — fans of the athlete over-index on single-income households, while the product targets dual-income millennials.
When leadership swaps idol worship for audience cartography, budgets tilt toward relevance and away from ego insurance.
2) The illusion of viral inevitability.
Social feeds overflow with instant-classic sponsorships, but survivorship bias hides the flops. For every skincare brand that nails a TikTok duet, ten sign talent who post once, collect payment, and bury the hashtag under new partnerships a week later.
Spotted’s crawl of untagged posts reveals that 62 percent of celebrity partners fail to mention the brand after the launch month.
3. The quiet power of micro-alignment.
When Electrolux tapped an Olympic swimmer for an energy-efficient dryer campaign, critics questioned the glamour quotient. Yet household purchase intent rose in markets where swimming clubs thrive — evidence that contextual credibility can outperform mass charm.
Comenos notes that trust often travels through subcultures, not mass channels. Visibility at 10 million impressions of indifference is worth less than 1 million impressions soaked in belonging.
None of this downgrades creativity; it repositions it. In the Comenos framework, art directors still chase arresting imagery, but briefs start with audience psychographics, not marquee wish lists.
The glamour shot survives, yet it coexists with a dashboard tracking audience-fit delta in real time. If the curve flattens, creative pivots mid-flight, not post-mortem.
Critics worry that such analytics will sterilize storytelling, producing only algorithmic safe bets. Comenos counters with a simple metric: lift in brand favorability when alignment outperforms surprise. Viewers don’t mind novelty; they mind dissonance.
Lady Gaga selling oat milk is unexpected and effective because values — radical self-expression, vegan advocacy — map to product truth. Data didn’t predict Gaga by name — it predicted an archetype, then creative intuition filled in the face.
That collaboration—machine patterning, human leap—foreshadows where brand leadership is headed. As privacy clampdowns thin third-party targeting, first-party emotion mapping grows valuable. Spotted-style platforms quantify unspoken traits: optimism codes, risk appetites, and humor valence. Leaders who read those maps can gamble with intentional odds, not roulette vibes. The CEO becomes curator, not oracle.
Comenos’ own trajectory models that ethos. She rarely appears in flamboyant keynotes; she appears in meeting rooms with scatterplots. Her visibility stems from making other people’s visibility work. In an age that equates leadership with personal branding, she offers a counter-narrative: let evidence be the loudest spokesperson in the room.
Where does this leave brands gearing up for holiday campaigns, juggling TikTok rookies and Hollywood veterans? Perhaps with a humbler checklist:
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Know whose trust you still need to earn.
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Match that trust to talent who already holds it.
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Test small, scale honest, adjust publicly if you miss.
That last step—public adjustment—may be the hardest for legacy executives. But Comenos argues it is also the future-proof move. Social media punishes pretense faster than press releases can spin. Brands that admit misalignment, swap partners, and explain the rationale score authenticity points otherwise bought through years of glossy ads.
She cites a beauty company that dropped a mega-influencer after sentiment analysis flagged accusations of greenwashing. Instead of doubling down, the CMO posted a candid thread outlining the data review process, then partnered with a smaller activist who walked viewers through the brand’s supply chain. Sales dipped for a quarter, then rebounded above baseline. Visibility shrank, credibility soared.
Leadership, in that light, is no longer about who you can attach a logo to; it’s about how quickly you can correct when the fit feels false. Comenos’ rise signals the ascendancy of that mindset. By quantifying alignment, she equips decision-makers to lead in public without bluffing.
The glamorous gamble isn’t dead—it’s merely been upgraded to a calculated risk with a receipt.
And if your CEO still insists on that childhood idol?
Show them the scatterplot.
Let data do the difficult talking. Because in the next decade of brand strategy, the most powerful endorsement may be the one that never needed a celebrity at all — just the right story told by the right voice to the audience who already believes.
