| By :
Dirik Hameed
Today a celebrity speaker is akin to specialists on pro sports teams such as relief pitchers. At the end of the game, with the game on the line, the team hands the ball, or the microphone, to the lone figure whose job is to close it out successfully. After the speaker makes the crowd laugh, or get inspired, or feel the presence of stardom, he or she can start counting the money. It's a lot of money. Nowadays there are talent agencies that do nothing but manage celebrity speaker. On their websites, the speakers are arranged galleries according to each specialty. This one does comedy. That one is a "motivational" speaker. Another specializes in after-dinner speeches. The fees might surprise you. A cast member from a popular TV series could cost $10,000 to $15,000. That price might get you a veteran tight end so long as he's not All-Pro, or an astronaut. An astronaut who was an alcoholic till he got religion, however, might run $30,000. Few things add to one's value as a celebrity speaker like overcoming an addiction. People make money merely from being relatives of people who overcame addiction, so long as they're somewhat famous. You might have to fork over thirty to fifty thousand dollars for the star of that beloved 1960s TV comedy, or for a fairly well-known - or not too well-known - captain of industry. This escalates up to ex-Presidents, who can get more than half a million dollars for an appearance. It's well worth asking whether it's worth it. In some cases, this can be calculated. If you happen to be a charity raising money to support teenage unwed mothers, you have can simply measure whether twenty thousand dollars to a celebrity who was once an unwed teen mother is worth it. The question would be whether that much more money arrived in donations or not. If it didn't, the organization just wasted a lot of money. If it did, that was good advertising. There are countless such gatherings which are inherently for-profit, or in any event, expected to yield revenue. If the occasion is a gun show, it will be fairly simple to determine if it was worth while to pay $100,000 to a reigning action film star, when for $15,000 some relative of the Earp family might have been available. However, if the gathering doesn't have as part of its purpose the generation of revenue, this becomes problematic, because your speaker does indeed expect to generate revenue. For instance, every college graduation has a graduation speech. There is no one present who would refuse to attend because the speaker lacked sufficient star power. Colleges are infamously strapped for money. The time may well have come to reconsider paying anything over $10,000 for the entertainment of a captive audience at an event that will not, itself, turn a profit. A conference of businessmen might reconsider the expensive pharmaceuticals CEO whose face graces magazine covers. The mid-level R & D scientist who led the team that designed the breakthrough vaccine might be more inspirational even if he doesn't speak as well. The time might have come to cut down on costs by broadening the field of celebrity speakers.
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