We love our celebrities, don’t we?
Christina Applegate takes motherhood … to celebrity status.
Zsa Zsa Gabor is a fabulous celebrity … and a panel of experts has been commissioned to find out why.
His very existence … makes Prince William a celebrity.
Because the public goes so (Lady) gaga over celebrities, celebs have been used to hawk products and services for decades. Often, they can add pizzazz to what is otherwise a pretty routine advertising campaign. But how effective are the added glitz and glamour in ringing up additional sales?
I’ve long suspected that the value of celebrity endorsements might be over-hyped. Now we have some quantifiable proof. Ace Metrix, a California-based ad measurement firm, evaluated ~2,600 television ads shown during 2010. The company tested 263 unique national ads featuring celebrity endorsements, spanning 16 industries and 110 separate brands. All ads were tested within 48 hours of breaking nationally in order to capture immediate rather than “cultivated” ad effectiveness.
The celebrity ads were then evaluated against a control group of non-celeb ads in order to determine their comparative effectiveness in generating ad “lift” (better performance).
What the Ad Metrix analysis found was that only ~12% of the ads using celebrities showed more than 10% lift over average advertising norms in their respective industries. Even more startling, ~20% of the celebrity ads yielded 10% or worse (net negative) performance over the average advertising norms.
Here are some of the celebrities who had a “net negative” effect on their clients’ TV advertising effectiveness during 2010 – worst listed first:
Tiger Woods (Nike) – I guess this hardly comes as a surprise!
Lance Armstrong (Radio Shack)
Kenny Mayne (Gillette)
Dale Earnhardt, Jr. (Nationwide Auto Insurance)
Donald Trump (Macy’s)
Which celebrities managed to generate better-than-average scores? Queen of the heap is Oprah Winfrey for her 2010 spots for Liberty Mutual and Progressive Insurance. Ed Burns (iShares) and Carl Weathers (Bud Light) took the other top honors in positive lift.
Peter Daboll, head of Ace Metrix, had this to say about the findings: “This research proves unequivocally that, contrary to popular belief, the investment in a celebrity in TV advertising is rarely worthwhile. It is the advertising message that creates the connection to the viewer in areas such as relevance, information and attention, and this remains the most important driver of ad effectiveness.”
Interestingly, Oprah’s ads weren’t pitching products per se, but rather addressing current issue topics – in this case, warning against texting while driving. So one way to get through to the consumer via a celebrity is if the content is informational rather than a sales pitch.
But if the goal of the advertising is product sales, chances are the more the celebrity is truly “connected” to an advertiser’s product or service, the more successful he or she will be in engaging the target audience beyond simply the “curiosity factor.”
You can read detailed findings from the Ace Metrix analysis here.
Nones Notes 
This is a really interesting topic. And it begs a couple of questions: How much do we understand about celebrity? And why are we, as a culture, so intoxicated by it.
What make this research so interesting is that many of us would find it surprising. We live in a culture that worships celebrity, and we expect celebrities’ opinions to matter, whether it’s about current issues, a cause, or some product. Fame automatically confers expertise and credibility, or so Madison Avenue and the glitterati suppose.
In 1978, a San Francisco ad man named Jerry Mander (I am not making this up) wrote a book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. In an interview, he summed up his thesis:
“…television has effects, very important effects, aside from the content, and they may be more important. They organize society in a certain way. They give power to a very small number of people to speak into the brains of everyone else in the system night after night after night with images that make people turn out in a certain kind of way. It affects the psychology of people who watch. It increases the passivity of people who watch. It changes family relationships. It changes understandings of nature. It flattens perception so that information, which you need a fair amount of complexity to understand…, this information is flattened down to a very reduced form on television. And the medium has inherent qualities which cause it to be that way.”
Well, one effect of television is its ability to create celebrity simply by providing exposure. Paris Hilton is famous because… well, because she’s on TV, i.e., She’s a celebrity simply by dint of the attention she gets on Inside Edition and other gossip shows.
It’s encouraging to know that empty celebrity may not have as much influence on consumers as Mander feared.
[…] Celebrity endorsements in advertising: All that glitters is not gold. (March 23, 2011) Or to quote William Shakespeare: “Much ado about nothing …” […]
[…] I’m not at all surprised about the paltry figure for celebrities. Celebrity endorsements in general are far less influential than many marketers would like to admit – a topic I’ve blogged about in the past. […]
[…] from famous people who don’t have a natural connection to the products they are touting. Such celebrity “testimonials” rarely pass the snicker […]