When Watch Brands Head to the Movies

The theory goes that the truly great movie stars have an on-screen persona of such power that it transcends grubby reality and whatever revelation some grubby tabloid chooses to spring on an unsuspecting public. Not so sports stars when they prove to have feet of clay.

Luxury watch brand Longines certainly knew what it was doing a few years back when it drafted in Humphrey Bogart, the ultimate movie tough guy - cool, controlled and as quick with a one-liner as he was with a gun - and Audrey Hepburn, a delicious amalgam of innocence and sophistication. Of course it helped that they were also deceased and thus pretty much unassailable by the red-tops.

Longines is still playing it smart. Among its current crop of champions is Ingeborga Dapkunaite, a Lithuanian actress who is both charming enough to rep the brand and obscure enough to be off the chart for the Anglo-US scandal sheets.

Not everyone has been so lucky. While Omega has bankers like George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, Raymond Weil ended up slapping a multi-million dollar lawsuit on its movie star ambassador, Charlize Theron, after she started checking the time at public events on a Dior watch.

Dior already pays Sharon Stone to do the same thing, though it might consider a trade. It was forced to drop Stone from its ads in China two years ago and issue a public apology after the ageing glamour-puss famously attributed a devastating earthquake in China to “bad karma” brought on by its treatment of Tibet.

That kind of brainlessness is enough to give any brand manager sleepless nights, so it’s little wonder that watchmakers are getting savvier about their movie-star choices and how they present them.

Tag Heuer still has Steve McQueen and that priceless link-up with the Monaco he sported in the auto-racing film Le Mans. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

But Tag also has Leonardo Di Caprio, not just a film star but “a deeply engaged activist” with “a long history or environmental philanthropy.” Montblanc has featured the likes of Nick Cage and Julianne Moore in charity tie-ins, opining earnestly on the need to “give something back”.

Good causes are now all the rage, a testimony to the social awareness now demanded of corporations everywhere and a handy way of rounding out and reinforcing their chosen star’s public persona while pre-empting bad news.

Baume & Mercier works this angle sweetly. Its current stars are Evangeline Lilly and David Duchovny, chosen because they are “internationally recognised, totally authentic and profoundly human.”

It is not immediately clear which Duchovny they are getting, the the cerebral Fox Mulder of X-Files or the cerebral but exceedingly louche Hank Moody of Californication, who in real life ended up in a clinic for sex addiction.

Let’s assume it’s the former, but it hardly matters. Not only are Lilly and Duchovny part of B&M’s long-running “Baume & Mercier & Me” charity campaign, as per usual they will be replaced later this year by two more screen stars. That leaves almost no time for bad news to attach to the brand.