Seeing models in the ads isn’t as common as it used to be. Today, it is all about celebrities.  From A-listers to reality show stars celebrities of all kind have endorsement deals with big name companies and many even with less known ones. As assumed, they get paid substantial amount of money and plus receive more exposure to the audience. Years ago, companies realized that the products sold better if there was someone consumers admired standing behind the product and the company.

shoppingblog.com

In the class, we studied the consumer behaviour, and the fact that using identical product as celebrities satisfies that psychological need that most of us crave for. Also, it all leads to the affective component of attitude. We are made to feel special. This is what companies were very well aware of and used it rigorously. But the question is, how effective it really is?

Recently I came across an article written by Peter Daboll named “Celebrities in Advertising are Almost Always a Big Waste of Money” (adage.com) which provides relatively solid evidence that the celebrity endorsements are really just a “big waste of money”. There was a time when they were effective, 5 years ago, but today in the world where social media dominates people are more likely to be “influenced by someone in their social network than a weak celebrity connection”. Furthermore, after studying all the ads for 11 months they found that generally celebrity ads tend to preform just average. (“Fewer than 12% of ads using celebrities exceeded a 10% lift, and one-fifth of celebrity ads had a negative impact on advertising effectiveness.” *)

adage.com

Of course this doesn’t apply to all celebrity ads as some of them enjoy outstanding success, but in the end what really matters is how well the ad is done and if it is able to intrigue the consumer.

* directly quoted from www.adage.com

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