In general, I shy away from interviews with stars and athletes who are representing a commercial product (in this case Chastain is working with Electrolux in their Kicking and Cleaning campaign). In some cases, celebrities just go on auto-pilot, spouting the talking points given to them and unwilling to interact like a genuine human. Ugh. What makes a worse interview?
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| Brandi Chastain |
But Chastain is a San Jose resident and the people I know who have met her describe her as genuine, smart and warm. The PR team at Sullivan and Partners LLC (with whom I was working) were incredible, hard-working and personable. When I couldn't make the audio portion of the interview work they put together a way I could do a video interview with my questions showing up as slides.
Anyway, all that is a long way of saying that my respect for Chastain and the PR team was very high, but still, I half-dreaded the prospect of getting canned answers.
Instead, I found her to have a disarming charm. Yes, she promoted Electrolux (a lot and well) but she did it in context, and she gave a lot of herself to the interview. She talked like a real person, she had interesting insights, and though she's probably been asked these same questions 1000 times, she answered with a freshness that made the video fly by.
The other reason I'm happy it worked out is because the Electrolux campaign invites parents to go to facebook.com/electrolux and share a proud parent moment which will benefit the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund. My eldest sister died from Ovarian cancer, so the cause is near and dear to my heart. I hope if you know a soccer mom, you'll send the article to her so that we can have millions of responses to the proud parent moment.
