There’s some juicy celebrity drama going on relating to the modeling and advertising industry. Ooh… yum.
In the marketing world, many times it is necessary to cast specific types of models for the target market. In this Old Navy (owned by Gap) advertisement, they chose a model named Melissa Molinaro that looks pretty close to the famous celebrity Kim Kardashian (Bruce Jenner’s stepdaughter, star of the reality TV show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”). She’s not 100% identical to Kim of course, but there are some pretty strong similarities in their features. Watch it, and see what you think.
The first thing I thought when I saw this Old Navy ad a few months ago… woah, who’s the Kim Kardashian lookalike!? Then next… wow, they’re even knocking off the Black Eyed Peas pretty hard. They are a trio, each of different ethnic backgrounds, similar to how the group in the Old Navy commercial was depicted. Those guys aren’t suing them, though. To add a bit more of interesting knowledge to the story, I read here that Melissa (the Kim Kardashian lookalike) is dating the real KK’s ex boyfriend, NFL football star Reggie Bush. Could this have sparked the lawsuit? Hmm… interesting. Oh, what tangled webs we weave.
We know Kim is a gorgeous model, but is she also a singer, like Melissa? Not that I know of. Melissa actually has a pretty great video here, and the song is actually decent when it comes to dance/pop standards. This is not the last we’re going to be seeing or hearing about this woman. Here is the music video for Melissa Molinaro’s song “Dance Floor”.
So that’s our celebrity dish post of the year, most likely. It’s interesting because underneath it all, it comes down to one model looking similar to another. Would I personally ever want to do a stock photoshoot with a model that looked almost nearly identical to huge celebrity? Like Lady Gage, Rhianna, Megan Fox, or Shia Lebouf? Probably not. While it would be incredibly tempting, that might have disaster written all over it. Stock images get used all over the place, in more applications than you might even expect. Sometimes marketers will use lookalikes almost deceptively, and stock photographers have no control over how or where the images are going to be popping up. Once celebs and their PR people and agents catch wind of these types of things, it’s sometimes time for them to break out their lawyers. They’ve got plenty of money to play around with as well. Let this be a lesson for all of us, even if in the end, Old Navy/Gap still comes out on top.
You can read more about the story here on USA Today.
