Are companies “winning” when they hire celebs to shill, and what happens when their spokesperson goes off the deep end?
In these celebrity-obsessed times, does the presence of a big-name endorser boost the effectiveness of advertising? Some recent research delivers a mixed, but largely positive, verdict.
A report this month from the Nielsen Co. examined viewer response to commercials that aired during the Academy Awards telecast on February 27, and it found that celeb endorsements garnered four of the top 10 places in the brand-recall standings. Of these, the strongest rating went to a spot for Best Buy, featuring not one but two celebrities: Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Bieber.
Right behind the Best Buy spot in the rankings was a commercial for Gillette’s Venus razor, starring Jennifer Lopez and her legs. Also in Nielsen’s brand-recall Top 10 were Celine Dion singing for the American Cancer society, and Adrien Brody crooning on behalf of Stella Artois.
In its report of the findings, Nielsen noted that the Best Buy and Stella Artois spots scored much better on Oscar night than they did when making their debut on this year’s Super Bowl telecast, which might indicate that viewers who already are intent on gazing at celebs are more receptive to them when they appear during a commercial break.
More proof
Celebrity endorsements also got a thumbs-up in a study released last month by GfK MRI’s Starch Advertising Research. It found that print ads get higher readership scores when they featured a celeb. “On average, the ads that contained a celebrity endorser produced 9.4 percent higher consumer readership than ads without a celebrity endorser,” said Starch’s report of its findings.
The “lift” in readership was even higher, at 15.1 percent, for ads featuring “entertainment celebrities.” Ads with “sports celebrities” also got a lift, but a considerably smaller one (7.5 percent). Of the 81,000-plus ads that Starch analyzed for this study, a CoverGirl & Olay spread featuring Ellen DeGeneres (running in last March’s issue of House Beautiful) scored best among those using an entertainment celebrity, garnering what the report termed a “phenomenal” readership score of 91 percent.
On the other hand…
While the Starch and Nielsen studies found consumers responding positively to celeb-endorsement advertising, a report released in January by Ace Metrix offered a dissenting voice where TV spots are concerned. (Ace specializes in gauging the effectiveness of TV advertising.) Analyzing viewer response to 2,600 commercials that aired between September and December 2010, the research firm found that celeb-centered commercials on average “do not perform any better than non-celebrity ads, and in some cases they perform much worse…. Over and over again, our analysis illustrated that celebrity ads performed either below average or merely equaled it.”
Part of the problem is that celebrities “are often polarizing.” The report cited Sarah Jessica Parker as an example of this, with respect to cosmetics advertising: “Some women believe Sarah Jessica Parker is beautiful, but others do not—the eye-of-the-beholder issue.”
Like them or not, celebrity endorsements are all the more ubiquitous these days, thanks to social media. A company called Ad.ly has made a business of running celebrity endorsements via Twitter and, more recently, Facebook. Earlier this year it issued a Consumer Influence Index that rated the celebrities it uses for their ability to drive consumer traffic to advertisers’ sites during the fourth quarter of last year. Lauren Conrad came in at #1 on the list, followed by the three Kardashian sistersand Snoop Dogg.
Whatever the medium in which celebrity endorsements appear, the vagaries of celeb behavior pose a risk for brands that employ big-name endorsers. As Starch notes in the analysis of its findings, “the downside of using celebrity endorsers has been in stark relief in the past few years” due to celebrity scandals. (The report gives Tiger Woods, Brett Favre and Charlie Sheen dishonorable mentions in this context.)
But do consumers hold it against a brand when its celeb endorser strays from the straight and narrow? An AdweekMedia/Harris Poll examined that question last year and found relatively few people inclined to engage in such guilt by association.
Seventy-four percent of that survey’s respondents said it wouldn’t affect how they feel about a brand if an endorser were involved in a scandal, vs. 22 percent saying they’d feel worse about the brand. And let us not forget that some people relish a good scandal. That may account for the six percent of men and three percent of women who said they “feel better” about a brand when its endorser has been caught in a scandal. Among respondents in the 18-34 age bracket, the “feel better” vote rose to double digits, at 11 percent.
Thank you Mark Dolliver for blogging this article!