BusinessReport.com

How much cash would a company have to shell out for an endorsement from one of the country’s hottest celebrities? Not just any run-of-the-mill hot celebrity—a smoking hot, in-the-headlines-every-day celebrity. The price tag would easily run in the tens of millions of dollars, marketing experts say. And of course, before any deal would be struck, the celeb would have to be wined and dined; think four-star dinners and courtside seats.

One Baton Rouge businesswoman has managed to nab just such an endorsement. As a result, her business received exposure on a major television network, on one of the most popular celebrity blogs on the Internet and, most recently, in The New York Times. The best part of the deal: The negotiations were a snap, and the endorsement was free.

The business is a small dancewear store called Pampo’s. The celebrity is Rosie O’Donnell. It’s not exactly the type of business you’d expect O’Donnell to associate herself with. “You think I have a choice?” O’Donnell joked on her blog in answer to a fan’s comment about the endorsement. Anyone who has a mother-in-law can understand exactly where O’Donnell is coming from.

Melanie Safer, the store’s owner for nearly 25 years, is O’Donnell’s mother-in-law. Her oldest daughter, Kelli Carpenter, married O’Donnell in San Francisco in 2004. Carpenter and O’Donnell have been a couple since 1998, and they have four children together.

All joking aside, O’Donnell says she is happy to support her mother-in-law’s business. And Pampo’s—on the Jefferson Highway side of Towne Center at Cedar Lodge—isn’t the only Baton Rouge business (or institution) to which she’s willing to give a shoutout. “I love Baum’s Bakery, Mansur’s and LSU football,” she says. O’Donnell isn’t shy about giving the entire city a ringing endorsement. “I love Baton Rouge,” she says. “It’s an amazing community. I was so proud of how the city embraced the refugees from Hurricane Katrina.”

It was in the beginning of May, before O’Donnell’s dramatic departure from ABC’s The View that Safer asked her daughter-in-law if she could plug her dancewear store on her blog at rosie.com. “I asked her to do it,” Safer recalls, “and she did. I was surprised; I didn’t know if she’d do it or not.”

Perched on a stepladder in the back storage room, the pretty, petite, 62-year-old Safer has the look of an ex-dancer. Although she describes her dancing days as “50 pounds ago,” she is spry and in great shape. Indeed, the ex-dancer-turned-dance instructor-turned-dancewear retailer still takes tap dancing classes. Safer half-jokingly wonders if she should tap dance on her next appearance in O’Donnell’s blog.

The first “blog-mercial” the pair did together back in May shows them seated in front of O’Donnell’s computer in her home office. The video is completely unscripted, with O’Donnell wearing a T-shirt and no makeup and Safer looking neat and put together with her “face on.” “I think everybody should wear makeup all the time,” she remarks.

In the beginning of the video, O’Donnell questions Safer about her business. “It is the place to buy dancewear and dance gifts and everything for your little ballet dancer,” Safer explains. She also discusses the store’s swimsuit selection and unique gifts for dancers. Safer ends her plug by directing the audience to the store’s Web site: “Pampo’s, pampos.com; ‘P’ as in petunia,” she says earnestly as O’Donnell raises her eyebrows. The two go on to chat about topics ranging from judgmental Christians to the acceptance of gay children to the war in Iraq to their mutual appreciation of Samuel Adams beer.

As a result of the video blog, Safer says sales on the store’s Web site have more than tripled. “It has had a tremendous impact,” she says. “That’s the best way I can describe it.” And for the first time in the store’s nearly 25 years in existence, its owner received fan mail. “I answered all the people who wrote,” she says. “Luckily, we didn’t get any crazies.” Much of the traffic that’s come to her site has come via the link that O’Donnell has posted on her blog, directly beneath the “Impeach Cheney” link.

It’s no wonder that Safer’s appearance in O’Donnell’s blog has put the Pampo’s Web site on the online map, so to speak. Since O’Donnell’s early departure from The View, her regular entries on her blog make headlines almost daily.

For instance, when O’Donnell blogged that a meeting with The Price is Right producers didn’t go in her favor, more than 100 news outlets covered the story. The blog again made headlines when she posted a photo of her young daughter playing dress up in a soldier’s costume. For its part, The New York Times recently wrote an article about the blog. To her delight, Safer’s video blog appearances were mentioned in the article.

The limelight isn’t always rosey, warns a local marketing expert. An association with a celebrity as controversial as O’Donnell could pose risks, points out Katie Riker Sternberg, principal of The Marketing Source and fix-yourmarketing.com. “Anytime you pick a celebrity to endorse your business, you not only take on that person, you also take on their politics, their antics, their behaviors and their misbehaviors,” she says. “Mrs. Safer has to understand that she gets the good with the bad, and with someone who’s controversial like Rosie, there’s both.”

But Safer isn’t worried about any negative fallout from the store’s association with O’Donnell. She’s confident that folks in Baton Rouge will focus on the good O’Donnell has done for Hurricane Katrina victims, especially all that her For All Kids Foundation has done to assist hurricane victims in Renaissance Village.

Whether she realizes it or not, Safer’s decision to hop on O’Donnell’s blog to promote her store’s Web site is in keeping with current online marketing trends. “Blogs are huge today as an advertising medium,” says Rasvir Mustan, vice president of development at 7Strategy, a Kansas City, Mo.-based firm that specializes in Internet marketing.

Safer has done two more Pampo’s video blogs with O’Donnell on rosie.com. In addition to the publicity from the video blogs, Pampo’s also received exposure on The View, when Rosie had the producers roll a clip of the Pampo’s video blog during the show’s Hot Topics segment. “Who in this day and age actually says ‘P’ as in petunia?” she quipped to the other ladies. “Who says that?”

Safer’s stint on The View didn’t stop there. She even managed to get into her very own celebrity feud of sorts when Barbara Walters referred to her as a “bigot” on the show. “I thought it was a joke at first, then Ro got mad. She thought it was terrible,” Safer says.

Safer says the next time she saw Walters after the insult, she said, “I just want to know why you think I’m a bigot? After all, I’m married to a man who is half Jewish!” Back at Pampo’s, Safer shrugs off the incident with a laugh. “I have so many other things going on. We have so much to be grateful for—11 grandchildren and their eight healthy parents. That kind of stuff doesn’t really bother me,” she says.

One thing that does bother Safer is low sales. After Hurricane Katrina, sales dipped with a drop in dance class attendance. On top of that, as a result of her move from the Mall of Louisiana to Towne Center, the store lost the walk-by traffic that drove its swimsuit sales. Keeping swimsuit sales up is important because it’s those sales that supplement the store during the off-season for dancewear. Now, says Safer, the spike in online sales is picking up that slack.

Going forward, Safer hopes to continue to grow the Pampo’s Web site. She says it’s her hope that pampos.com will someday be the amazon.com of dancewear. “I’m excited to see what Pampos.com—‘P’ as in petunia—holds for us,” she says.