Before last Wednesday, few people had heard of plainmary.com, a website selling posh baby gear. By week's end, the site had more than two million hits and had received orders from as far away as Dubai. Credit a tiny item in Rush & Molloy, a gossip column in the New York Daily News, that reported Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had, six weeks earlier, ordered two of its US$190 monogrammed mats for their then-unborn twins. What made the story buzz-worthy was the news one of the mats had been ordered for "Rex Leon," not "Knox Leon," as their latest little boy is named, suggesting a last-minute change of mind.

The source of this breaking news? That would be Andy Behrman, plainmary.com's publicist, who learned gossip fundamentals writing for New York magazine. "It's critical for a company like plain mary to have celebrity associations," he says. "I mean who gives a s--t about a plain mary baby mat? But, all of a sudden, if the tush of a sainted Jolie-Pitt is peeing on this $190 microfibre mat, that's a $10,000 mat that we'll see on eBay shortly."

Behrman comes to the job having sharpened his tabloid incisors repping Petit Trésor, the celebrity-gossip-fuelled Los Angeles purveyor of baby paraphernalia recently hyped in People's gushing coverage of Jennifer Lopez's Versailles-style nursery. Its two stores have become go-to destinations for paparazzi seeking "baby bumps," and the celebrities vying for their attention. "When Tori Spelling goes into Petit Trésor, she knows there will be 10 photographers there because I'm going to call," he says. Even negative publicity has burnished the store's celebrity cred. In May, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes thrust the company into headlines with a cease-and-desist letter that complained bogus information had been leaked that they had dropped between US$350,000 and US$400,000 at Petit Trésor in the two years since their daughter had been born, in an "off the record" quote to Life & Style magazine "for the purpose of enhancing [the store's] image and obtaining a commercial advantage." (Behrman says the number was an estimate of what they'd spent in total, not only at the store.)

Such is the power of strategically placed celebrity gossip, next to which product placement in movies seems downright quaint. Today's smuthound may think she's catching up on the latest chapter in the Kate Hudson-Lance Armstrong romance as the pair are paparazzi-ed playing tennis. But the fact they're outfitted in gear from Nike, a company Armstrong represents, suggests another agenda may be at work, one in which the gossip consumer is in fact the one being consumed. Paparazzi and celebrities routinely work together, says Mario Lavandeira, a.k.a. Perez Hilton, whose blog PerezHilton.com has made him a bona fide celebrity. It's not uncommon for paparazzi to pay a celebrity for exclusive shots, he says. "They all work differently. Some will get cash upfront — $10,000, $15,000. Or they'll get a cut of the profit." Product placement happens a lot, he says, noting Lindsay Lohan was paid to carry a nicotine replacement a while back. "Spencer and Heidi were photographed last week holding up some Nintendo game," he says, referring to the much-gossiped-about stars of The Hills. "It's like a free ad."

Bonnie Fuller, the former editor of Star who has just formed Bonnie Fuller Media, views the current scandal involving Madonna's alleged affair with New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez as a classic example of gossip being marshalled into marketing buzz. Her sources tell her the two have known each other for months. Yet Madonna chose to make their association public — appearing in Rodriguez's box at Yankee Stadium — just as reports that sales for her upcoming world tour and latest CD were flagging, Fuller notes. "She's very sophisticated and aware of how publicity plays into celebrity. She has courted controversy throughout her career to boost her profile." Madonna is untouched by negative press, says Fuller. Being named an alleged home wrecker able to lure a much younger athlete only reinstates her bad girl, man-eater rep, a shrewd move for the 49-year-old, she says.

"There are no coincidences in Hollywood," says Elaine Lui, the Vancouver-based blogger behind Laineygossip.com, the popular site that avidly chronicles the photo ops and smut eruptions that occur just before a tour or movie release. "I think certain celebrities and publicists are savvy to the fact that they can no longer control the message the way they did before, so this is their attempt to control the message and use it to their advantage," says Lui, who's currently trying to track down whether Naomi Watts, who recently appeared at a Donald Trump-sponsored event, is angling for an apartment in one of his buildings. "She's not like Nicole Kidman, she's not a fame whore, so I'm thinking, what's going on here? And real estate is at such a premium in New York. Even rich people can't get the home that they want. So I'm like what can Donald Trump offer? Real estate."

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