Let's be honest — it was tough to stand out in the early days of digital cameras. The options from Nikon, Canon, Sony, and more were all severely limited in both their capabilities and design (your choices were basically silver or black, maybe plasticky white if you were lucky).

So it's almost hard to blame HP, a company never really known for cameras, for trying to corner some of the emerging market by giving Gwen Stefani — the artist with literally the biggest song in the country at the time — the reins to design her own camera in 2005.

The result was the Harajuku Lovers digital camera. It was a pocket-sized shooter with now-laughable specs like a 4.1-megapixel sensor and 3X optical zoom. The name of Stefani's hit album at the time — Love. Angel. Music. Baby. — ringed the colorful camera's lens, written out in some sort of Ed Hardy font, and buyers were also blessed with a DVD that featured interviews, images a remix track, and screen savers.

Years later, another tech company was being pushed out of the camera market — only this time it was legacy brand Polaroid. As the company began farming out its brand to other hardware makers to save face, it brought Lady Gaga on board.

The move was announced at CES in 2010 (a common theme for these stunt hires), and the press release contains one of the all-time greatest quotes "from" a celebrity that pretty obviously wasn't written by her:

"Lifestyle music art fashion: I am so excited to extend myself behind the scenes as a designer and to as my father puts it — finally LLC (PLR) (Editor's note [...sic?]) the new owner of the Polaroid brand," Gaga says. "In the past six months PLR has assembled a family of Polaroid partners for product development marketing distribution and licensing. Building upon Polaroid's rich history the Polaroid partner network will support fans and users of classic Polaroid products and deliver new Polaroid products to a new generation of Polaroid customers while staying true to Polaroid's long-standing values of fun and simplicity."

For what it's worth, Gaga at least helped bring some ideas to market. One year later, she helped the brand unveil the "GL20," a pair of smart glasses with cameras and OLED screens — sort of a proto-combination of Google Glass and HoloLens. In addition, she helped develop and announce the GL30 — a traditional-looking Polaroid camera with digital features — as well as an accompanying mobile printer. Meanwhile, Polaroid's branding showed up in her music video for "Telephone." A feature story in V Magazine was adorned with scans of Polaroid pictures of Gaga, and she often tweeted behind-the-scenes photos of her working on Polaroid projects.

None of this exposure really moved the needle, however, and as a result, Polaroid dropped Gaga from her position in 2014.

Over the years, Intel has become known more for its microprocessors and supercomputers — products that aren't necessarily "hip." So, in 2011, the company hired will.i.am into the position of director of creative innovation.

"It’s imperative that Intel and our innovations are kept in front of the global youth culture that embraces new devices and new forms of communication and entertainment," the company's chief marketing officer said at the time.

The collaboration resulted in stunts like sending will.i.am on a world tour to "promote the creative possibilities of the Ultrabook" in 2012.

Later that year, will told Fortune that he wanted to make actual products with Intel, not just brand them. "Artists are always putting their names on shit," he said. "Intel makes the brain — that’s why I wanted to hook up with them.”

But nothing much ever came out of will's tenure with Intel, to the extent that the singer went out and made his own (terrible) smart wearable called the Puls.

The languishing BlackBerry apparently felt the need to add some extra umph to its CES announcement of BlackBerry 10 OS, so the company brought Alicia Keys on board as a global creative director. She claimed to be "fascinated by the technology," and even called BlackBerry's new OS "fly."

Aside from appearing in some promotional materials and speaking at corporate events, Keys' year-long tenure was as fruitless as it was hollow. In fact, it wound up just giving people more reason to kick a company that was already down. To wit: one month after the hire, Keys tweeted from an iPhone, which she defended by claiming she'd been hacked. No surprise, since Keys wrote about being an "iPhone junky" on Google+ just one year prior.

Verizon used its time at the 2013 CTIA trade show to launch Viva Movil, a massive and ambitious initiative to get more phones in the hands of Latino users. The company made the announcement alongside entertainment star Jennifer Lopez, who had been tapped as Viva Movil's chief creative officer.

Lopez said at the time that Viva would be focused on refreshing the existing Verizon retail experience by making stores more family-friendly and staffing them with attentive employees. The company's retail presence grew quickly, spreading from New York to Los Angeles and Miami, but the idea never stuck. Some stores were closed, while others were rebranded back to plain Verizon colors and logos. For all her celebrity, Lopez was apparently never able to get the word out about what Viva Movil actually was. "More than one customer has come in asking for coffee," a Viva employee told CNET in 2014.

Lenovo fights a perennially tough fight for space in the computer market, so it looked to Ashton Kutcher for help in 2013. The company brought on the actor-turned-entrepreneur to help develop and market its Yoga line of tablets and PCs.

One year later, the company released the fruit of this relationship: the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro. And wouldn't you know it, it was actually a pretty decent Android tablet. It was certainly a much more successful endorsement campaign for Kutcher than his controversial stint as a Pop Chips spokesperson.

No one in the tech industry can get enough of will.i.am. Just three years after being brought onboard at Intel, the Black Eyed Peas frontman was named to a similar title at 3D Systems, one of the leading 3D printing companies in the world.

will's biggest accomplishment (aside from skyping into a robot at CES in 2015) was working on the Ekocycle, a version of one of 3D Systems' printers that prints with recycled materials.

This particular stunt hire spawned some of the best will.i.am quotes to date, thanks to a number of press engagements he did on behalf of the company. “Eventually 3D printing will print people," he said. “If you can print a liver or a kidney, god dang it, you’re going to be able to print a whole freaking person."

Then the artist got biblical. “Now we’re getting into a whole new territory," he said. "Moses comes down with the 10 Commandments and says ‘Thou shalt not.’ He didn’t say shit about 3D printing.”

The saddest and most recent hire comes from the bankrupt RadioShack. RadioShack, once the giant when it came to brick-and-mortar electronics stores, has struggled to cope with the boom in online shopping over the last decade. Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, it has tried to sell of parts of its business to stay afloat, including a majorly failed rebranding (remember "The Shack," anyone?) and briefly giving Sprint control of its remaining retail presence.

Now, with seconds left on the proverbial clock, RadioShack's Hail Mary is Nick Cannon. Why? It doesn't really matter. Cannon can talk about saving the brand by "creating RadioShack-exclusive products and curating the in-store experience" all he wants, but there's a better chance that will.i.am will rewrite the 10 Commandments.