He Puts the Soda in Pop Songs

In the past two years, Adam Kluger has built a boutique product-placement agency that's become a cash conduit for the revenue-needy music business

Peter van Agtmael

By Burt Helm

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Adam Kluger is in a hurry and this Ford Explorer won't get out of the way of his Bentley. He's driving north from Miami to a music video shoot in Fort Lauderdale featuring both his new recording artist and his corporate client. It's 3 p.m. The shoot doesn't start until after 4, but still.

Kluger muscles his black coupé almost on top of the SUV's rear bumper. "The music industry's very laid back while I'm very, very aggressive," he says, clutching the wheel and his BlackBerry (RIMM) in a two-handed grip that lets him type and tailgate. He's 24, short, lean, and talks as fast as he's trying to drive. "I just need to get stuff done immediately."

In the past two years, Kluger has built a boutique agency that's become a conduit between the revenue-needy music business and a growing source of cash: consumer brands. Those who have seen the parade of products in Lady Gaga's Telephone video have gotten a taste of The Kluger Agency's work. With a check and Kluger's help, products end up in music videos, lyrics, even song titles.

Kluger's newest project is managing a pop singer, an aspiring teen idol named JRandall. To build buzz, Kluger hired Grammy-winning singer T-Pain to appear in JRandall's video and sing a verse for the song, a dance track called Can't Sleep. Kluger's funding the music and video production both by the traditional method (with JRandall's label, Poe Boy Music Group) and with money from Zoosk, a dating website and one of his agency's clients.

Singers have name-checked brands since before Janis Joplin asked the Lord to buy her a Mercedes-Benz. But the practice of advertisers paying for a mention in songs has exploded. "I get calls on country, rock 'n' roll—today it's across the board, in every genre of music," says Brooke Wilson, head of music entertainment at The Marketing Arm, an agency that deals in endorsements. This year she got State Farm's logo into a video by rock band OK Go. "It's really started happening in the past 5 to 7 years. It comes down to the labels not having enough money and needing other avenues to promote themselves." Kluger's specialty is bringing product placement to niche brands and fledgling artists, not just big products and stars.

Approaching Ft. Lauderdale as Can't Sleep blasts through the Bentley's 1,100-watt speakers, Kluger talks about replicating JRandall, who got a placement deal before he released his first album. He wants to build a record label based entirely on brand dollars. He wants to party with his pals in the Ford (F) Excursion stretch limo he just bought. There's so much to do, it hurts. "I call it my burning ambition," Kluger says, still riding the Explorer's exhaust pipe. "It literally pains me. Like, really pains me."

Before the cars and the rock stars, Kluger grew up in Tampa, the distractible son of a jeweler father and a mother in the apparel business. While other students sat attentively in class, Kluger doodled business ideas. After school hours he bounced around fast-food jobs and sold knives door-to-door. Childhood pal Joel Cardieri remembers the few weeks Kluger worked behind the counter at a local Boston Market. "He'd say things like, 'I'm not going to be here long. Something's going to happen soon, I feel it!' "

Kluger says he's always been obsessed with pop music. He recalls coming home from camp in 1999 with a song stuck in his head—Summer Girls, a bubblegum rap ditty with brand-conscious lyrics such as "I like girls that wear Abercrombie & Fitch." The song made him want to dance—and shop. "I was like, I gotta get Abercrombie & Fitch!" he says.

In 2006, after attending a two-year college in Gainesville, he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in a for-profit vocational school to learn how to make it in music. As he sat through classes on royalties and audio engineering, he got a sense of just how much the recording industry was suffering.

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