After Octavia Spencer won her Oscar for The Help, she was approached to endorse a weight loss product called Sensa. Unlike a lot of celebs, she decided she wanted to promote the product as ethically as possible. She set a lot of ground rules with Sensa. She wanted to focus on living a healthier lifestyle, not lose massive amounts of weight. She didn’t want to do Before and After pictures. She insisted that tweets about the company include the #spon tag so her fans would know she was getting paid to tweet. She didn’t want the ads to appear in gossip and tabloid type magazines. Sensa originally agreed to these terms, but eventually balked at her use of the #spon tag. They also eventually got her to do Before and After pics and started placing ads in magazines like OK! and Star.
Sensa says Octavia’s ads did not do as well as planned and they sent her a termination letter saying she was in breach of her contract for her tweets and the failure of the ads. Octavia filed a lawsuit saying the company owed her $700,000 of her $1.25 million contract.
Octavia said she passed up a $3 million offer from another weight loss company to take Sensa’s $1.25 million offer and that after she lived up to her side of the bargain by losing 20 pounds in 5 months, Sensa began “scheming” to get out of paying her.
In March, a judge threw out her fraud claim against Sensa, but allowed “a cause of action for breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing”. A trial is scheduled for October 27. Sensa’s web site currently has an ad featuring Ali Landry.
