Celebs: A Big Waste of Money

Earlier this year, ad age wrote an article based on studies that showed celebrities in advertising don't pay big dividends. In other words, using big names to sell a product is a big waste of money. The study showed that fewer than 12% of ads using celebrities exceeded a 10% lift, and one-fifth of celebrity ads had a negative effect on advertising effectiveness (Daboll).

Does this mean celebs are losing their spark at influencing consumers? According to the author, that's exactly what it means. The article says that consumers aren't the same as they used to be. In fact, the same ads that influenced us five years ago would probably be ineffective today.

In other words, it takes a lot more than a movie star or rock star to sell us something. As consumers, we are much more informed, time compressed, and critical. There's not much we haven't seen, and we're difficult to impress. Having an enormous amount of ads thrown at us is annoying enough, and sometimes the idea of celeb pushing them makes it more irritating. In fact, the study shows that consumers want relevance and messages that contain quality attributes.

If you take a look at the worst celebrity endorsements of 2010, Tiger Woods was at the top of the list. Not just because of the controversy surrounding his scandal, but because marketers went about advertising the brand the wrong way. They focused on addressing his "mistakes," rather than the product he was supposed to be promoting. If an ad has bad creative, mixing a celeb usually makes it even less effective and more confusing to the viewer.

What it comes down to is adding a celebrity to an already poor creative message is like rubbing salt in the wound. Brands need to charging their agencies to create ads that have a strong, creative message that has a high level of relevance, information, desire and attention. Just because an ad is popular, funny and goes viral doesn't mean sales went up for the product. In the same way, just because a celeb is has dozens of box-office hits or platinum selling albums doesn't mean they'll be able to sell a particular product. The study shows that there is a negative relationship between celebrities and ad effectiveness.