In marketing and advertising, celebrities play a powerful role in creating and enhancing value(s) to the products. Which celebrity appears in which product commercial tells a lot about which market segment, or focus audience, it is targeting towards.

For example, One Direction and Drew Brees have appeared in a Pepsi commercial, drawing both young female fans and American-football-loving males into liking Pepsi.

H&M also gets David Backham in its commercial (and also a famous director, Guy Ritchie – Madonna’s ex-husband – to direct). The target audience is most likely to be those in 20s, 30s and perhaps even teens. Most probable is that the majority of them are females.

There actually are (less costly and yet effective) alternatives to using the celebrities in the commercial. For example, getting unknown amateur actors or those in one’s social circle to act, using some drawings OR just doing a commercial simply focusing on the product’s features. Many commercials do take on these alternatives, save a lot of advertising cost and are successful in garnering attention and gaining popularity with the audience.

And yet, many products companies are very eager in getting celebrities to endorse, promote and advertise their products. Why? 

Primarily, they want to easily capture a great number of followers, fans, of particular celebrities as their target market, assuming that the loyalty to the celebrities extends to an automatic loyalty to the product brand, and thereby gaining some market advantage over their competitors.

Hence, David Beckham keeps appearing in many commercials, “banking $42 million from commercial endorsements from sponsors.” Source: http://www.forbes.com/profile/david-beckham/

So who else is after Beckham. Samsung!

While Samsung seems to gear Beckham commercial more towards the global market, it also has another commercial with the korean celebrities, aiming mainly for the korean youth market and also perhaps the Asian youth market.