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To help decide which celebrity is the best choice for a film role or product endorsement, entertainment and marketing executives can tap into a host of numbers to gauge public figures' star power. So many, in fact, that the numbers leave a dizzying portrait of who's hot and who's not. At least four companies regularly track opinion on public figures in entertainment and sports. The venerable Q Score, in its fifth decade, surveys consumers once or twice a year by mail. Three newer competitors rely on the Web, enlisting panel participants to weigh in more regularly. The numbers are marketed to advertisers and casting directors to help them identify celebrities for product pitches or starring roles. But the various ratings sometimes show sharply different results.

Last July, 65% of respondents to an E-Poll Market Research poll who were aware of Mr. Woods said they liked him, or liked him a lot. That proportion dropped to 26% in their latest rating, earlier this month. Some 31% found the golfer insincere, while only 2% found him trustworthy (compared with 1% and 28%, respectively, for Tom Hanks in the most recent poll, last April).

Davie Brown Entertainment, a unit of Omnicom Group, began polling in 2006, after talking to marketers and ad agencies about the attributes most important to them in celebrity endorsers. The company settled on seven attributes, including appeal, influence and trust. Respondents who recognize the celebrity are asked to rate him or her on each of those attributes on a six-point scale. Then their scores are averaged, and that attribute average is combined with awareness, which is weighted more heavily, to produce the Davie Brown Index. Assigning so much weight to name recognition can yield perplexing results. Mr. Woods's index dropped only modestly, to 80.9 just before his apology from 89.2 a year earlier, in part because slightly more people were aware of him. This helped overcome a plummet in trust, to 43.7 from 68.8. "The overall DBI number is very, very important, but we look at everything," says Jeff Chown, president of Davie Brown Entertainment's talent division. The newest entrant on the scene, Millward Brown, rates celebrities and brands on the same scale, to identify the best marketing fit. Like the Davie Brown Index, Millward Brown's Cebra scores also emphasize familiarity, which is averaged with likability and "buzz," or media attention. Mr. Woods's Cebra score dropped only slightly, to 67 this month from 70 last September. A crash in likability, to 46 from 69, was mitigated by a surge in buzz, to 85 from 74; and a small bump in familiarity, to 70.

Reach: Addressable ads are currently available in up to 42 million households through live TV and video-on-demand. The pool is expected to reach 50 million households by the end of this year.

Measurement: Nielsen is not the currency. Operators typically use Rentrak or Kantar Media for audience measurement.

How it works: Marketers pinpoint their target audiences and create a household profile using data such as income, ethnicity, children in the household and car leases set to expire. They then work with cable operators to determine the number of addressable-enabled households that fit their target and serve commercials to just those homes.