"And that, after all, is what a brand is," said James Twitchell, an author and professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida. "Celebrities are these extraordinary characters who have no plot, but who are in many ways the easiest characters to follow. They don't violate expectations because there really are none."
And so Moss' cool -- the historical cool of bad boys and girls doing things that most of us, being properly middle class, might wish to do but will never get around to, explained Michael Brody, chairman of the media committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry -- becomes something different and better in a marketing sense when one adds a dollop of scandal or edge.
"Edge denotes shame," said Brody, the kind invoked when, for example, one is caught by a camera huddled over a mound of white powder, neatly chopping lines. "People use cameras to take all kinds of pictures now," he added, alluding to the proliferation of too-intimate images widely available on sites like MySpace.com. "If you're selling a camera in our celebrity-obsessed culture, why not use a celebrity and one who was captured at the scene of a crime?" he said.
The idea is not just sexy, in a dubious but distinctly transgressive fashion. It is also a shrewd exploitation of brand. "From the minute her name came up, we loved the idea of Kate endorsing a camera," said Oberlander, the McCann Worldwide executive. What could be better, Oberlander said, than giving a camera to a woman who has spent her life as the focus of the camera's gaze and letting her "take the lens and turn it on the audience?"
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