Running Head: Celebrity Advertisements

Running head: Celebrity Advertisements: The Good, The Bad and the What the? 1

BA 530 Marketing Management Writing Assignment #4: Celebrity Advertisements: The Good, the Bad, and the What the?

Tim Davis

Grantham University

Celebrity Advertisements: The Good, the Bad and the What the?

How many times does a print ad, a television commercial or even a radio ad promote a sports celebrity endorsing a product? Nearly every day, if not multiple times a day, people read, see and hear this phenomenon. The real question is does it work? There are varying opinions on this subject.

A prime example of celebrity advertisements are the commercial spots during the Super Bowl. Imagine the number of Snickers candy bars that were sold after seeing Betty White get tackled in the mud and Roseanne Barr get flattened with a huge log. The Snickers ads are an example of a successful multimarket strategy with a single product. As defined by Jain and Haley, a multimarket strategy serves several distinct markets with an objective to diversify the risk of only serving one market (Haley, 2009, p. 268). Additionally segments must be carefully selected and the strategy must avoid confrontation with companies serving the entire market. Mars, Inc. advertisers utilized exceptional creativity while weaving an ad that appealed to multiple generations/markets with this group of ads. These ads definitely fit in the “Good” category which relates to a successful strategy i.e., higher sales and increased market share.

Conversely, there are ads that are not as successful in achieving the intended results. Though the use of celebrities to endorse products is very prevalent, research suggests that just because a pretty face is attempted to be linked to a specific beauty product, or a well known actor is paired with cologne, more often than not the result is failure. Peter Daboll, author of “Why Celebrities in Advertising Are Almost Always a Big Waste of Money”, stated “We studied every nationally televised ad for the first 11 months of 2010 and found that celebrity ads performed either below average or merely equaled it.” (Daboll, 2012). The thought that a population could resist the celebrity charm is nearly unbelievable. Daboll’s study found that.

In fact, yes. Today's consumer is a totally different animal than the consumer of even five years ago, meaning that what was effective and influential five years ago is not necessarily so today, as today's consumer is more likely to be influenced by someone in their social network than a weak celebrity connection. Today's consumer is informed, time-compressed,