Digital Trail

Celebrity endorsements are nothing new, if anything, in this uber celebrity 15 minutes of fame driven society they are on the increase but what do they actually do for brands and where are the endorsements of the future going?

There are recent notable examples of brands dropping their celebrity face in the wake of revelations and tabloid conjecture. Notably, Kerry Katona, the bastion of motherhood, being ditched by Iceland on the back of Sunday tabloid revelations relating to substance abuse beyond a £1 Iceland ready-meal.

When pairing up a celebrity with a brand and things go well, it is easy to kick back and relax. That massive chunk of funding you have given this public eye entity was money well spent. Gary Lineker never got booked in his career and has carved a niche as ‘Mr Nice Guy’ so no sweat over him doing something bad like popping a cheeky Pringle.

But a brand can not control the one they pay to endorse. You can have as water-tight a contract as you like that says as a beacon of the brand you can not do this or dabble in that, but celebrities are human, they are suckers for temptation when they are offered the world and they do stray.

To the future, I envision a slight change in the role of celebrity endorsements and this is with a view to the use of Twitter and Facebook. This theory is based on observations of how things are starting to unfold on these platforms.

Agencies can now create the celebrity and thus control their brand endorsing face more carefully. For example, Compare the Market and their ingenious and ubiquitous Compare the Meerkat campaign has seen sales increase and thanks to a combined social media assault through Facebook and Twitter, Sergei – the little furry face of cheaper car insurance has single paw-dly hit the big time. Through an interactive and engaging Twitter and Facebook account, not to mention the Compare the Meerkat website itself, our little Russian friend has driven traffic and sales to the desired Compare the Market website without a single mention of the target site in its Facebook or Twitter activity. No tweets with links to the best deal or target site homepage, just pure character based tweets and a killer catchphrase that has reverberated around playgrounds, offices and everyday conversation. Simples.

Facebook and Twitter celebrity accounts with mass followings (and comparatively minuscule follow backs themselves) provide a ready made platform to endorse anything for a fee to their impressionable and idolising following. The rules have changed and results are there for the taking.

If you take the example of Stephen Fry and his Twitter account, not through paid for endorsement but out of his passion to share great Tech tips, on several occasions, Mr Fry has brought small time websites to their knees by Tweeting a recommendation to his vast following to go and check out site X. Site X not being prepared for such a volume of traffic crashes-the hat tip from Mr Fry a blessing and curse in equal measure.

So of the future, celebrity accounts will be created and maintained by agencies and not the Celebs themselves. (I am still hugely sceptical that Andy Murray updates his Twitter given the nature of the Tweets-all smiles and positivity-it appears awkward, forced and just not personable.) As soon as the following is built up, then the link to product or website X is casually dropped into Twitter conversation and the loyal following navigates to the intended source and laps up what their idol has recommended.

Sure the same pitfalls apply in that you cannot control the celebrity’s behaviour in real life, that is of course unless you create  a fictional Meerkat, but you can cultivate the following and control the brand message with a yield of higher results for a fraction of the cost of a television advert.