Do celebrity endorsements work? Yes, they do. Otherwise, we wouldn’t see advertisements with celebrities every day, would we? Catherine Zeta-Jones’ endorsement deal with T-Mobile was reportedly worth 20 Million. Subsequently, T-Mobile’s national sales jumped 25% during the campaign. Celebrity endorsements are now on Twitter, too!
Why does celebrity advertising work?
Celebrity advertising works on 3 different levels:
- Familiarity – we see hundreds of advertisements on a daily basis, so the ability to differentiate an advertisement is key and celebrities can provide that. Catherine Zeta-Jones definitely made folks pay a little closer attention than the Verizon guy!
- Emulation – we’re a driven (shallow) society and the dreams of wealth and fame influence us. Seeing someone we hope to be like or are attracted to is a strong advertising tactic. No doubt that Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey (sigh) drove millions of new users to Twitter… now they can make some bucks on it!
- Reputability – being recognized as a reputable business is key to a business’ growth. Customes rarely do business with another business unless they trust that the business is legitimate. A celebrity endorsement can definitely speed the time it takes for your business to be seen as reputable.
With the launch of Sponsored Tweets, you can purchase sponsored tweets via Izea’s system. No joke here – you can get everyone from Kim Kardashian to Bob Vila! I signed up today and have the outlandish price tag of $25 per tweet. I supposed that’s ok… given that Kendra’s price tag is too much to publish on the site! (I’m not sure Kendra will be driving sales of my e-Book or increase traffic to the blog)… I digress.
Interesting thoughts DK. Just thought I'd mention some interesting research that supports celebrity endorsements. Most of the theoretical background comes from a seminal paper on human persuasion published by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo on their Elaboration Likelihood Model. Their claim is that there are two primary routes to mental persuasion, the central and the peripheral (thought to have evolved as a mental mechanism to block information overload). The central is a more logical argument and gets processed by the mind's full resources while the peripheral is the mind's way of making sort of a "passing" judgement of sorts. What's most interesting is that the factors that determine how we assign judgement to information processed peripherally are most determined by very shallow human fascinations – such as age, sex appeal, celebrity status, or personal gain. Very interesting stuff indeed, and there's tons more research out there if you or any readers wanted to take a look.