The latest celebrity creative to launch into the advertising space is Kendrick Lamar, the rapper who starred in this year’s Apple Super Bowl Half Time Show and famously has an ongoing feud with rival Drake.
In launching Project 3 Agency, Lamar brings a strong pedigree of working with brands including Chanel, Converse, and Calvin Klein. With his production company pgLang, he won three 2023 Cannes Lions for his work with Cash App and a Film Grand Prix for his own music video, We Cry Together, in the same year.
A video accompanying Project 3’s launch stars Lionel Boyce (the pastry chef from The Bear) and Chase Sui Wonders (the ambitious junior executive from The Studio) and is intended to showcase the way that the company sees the world.
Project 3 Agency is part of Lamar’s company pgLang (short for “program language”) and is born of the acquisition of creative studio Frosty.
Lamar joins the ranks of famous names who are muscling in on creative advertising (as if AI wasn’t already eating enough of its lunch) including Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort (which just made the Gwyneth Paltrow Astronomer spot), Idris Elba’s Silly Face, Sharon Horgan’s Merman, Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, Shaquille O’Neal’s Majority Agency, and Pharrell Williams’ Mighty Dream.
Why would celebrities want to do this when the ad agencies are struggling to make a profit from their creative endeavours? One reason might be to offer an alternative to all those “pointless Monday meetings” mentioned in Project 3’s launch film, but most probably it’s because the celebrity creatives are impressively entrepreneurial, know their own value, and are skilled at charging good money for their impact on the brands they work with.
As Dave Free, Lamar’s school friend and his partner at pgLang, told Fast Company: “We were seeing companies we admired, but the storytelling was lacklustre. And a lot of it is because the agency motto became a turnover business of more, more, more. Sometimes that’s great, you need that. But [the storytelling] also has to help people. It has to change the world. It has to latch onto people.”
