Celebrities have been used to sell products since the 19th century, but the politics and ethics of celebrity in a world with social media (and Kanye West) present new challenges to both the influencer and the brand, as the nature of the relationship changes.
When living in New York, it is very possible to encounter a celebrity going about their life, especially in certain areas. The pioneering and polarizing blog Gawker was founded on that insight. There are guides published for tourists featuring current restaurants to visit to increase one’s chances of a sighting. Residents know they must never interrupt or stare, it’s not the done thing. It’s taboo because, as anyone who has unexpectedly encountered a famous person coming out of a toilet stall in a restaurant will recognize, it is hard not to gawk. Celebrities attract attention because of the attention they have attracted.
Advertising is in the attention business so it didn’t take long for manufacturers to work out that celebrities might be useful. The first celebrity endorsements were Royal warrants, which have been issued for centuries to anyone that supplied goods to a royal family and, importantly, allows them to advertise using that fact. Pioneering FMCG advertiser Pears Soap put West End actress Lily Langtree on their posters in 1882, making her the first of this kind of celebrity to ‘endorse’ a commercial product.
We can already see how the word endorse is being stretched oddly here. The Royal warrant meant that royalty was vouching for the quality because they were willing to buy it, whereas Lily simply appeared in advertising, her own soap choices unknown. This blurry conflation of promotion and endorsement has continued ever since, picking up steam when companies started making products for, or with, celebrities. Nike’s partnership with Michael Jordan generates billions in annual revenue to this day. The product-celebrity fit between athletes and sports brands is obvious but the approach spread broadly.
Brands hire innumerable celebrities as expensive actors for advertising. According to Kantar 16% of ads globally, and over half of Japanese ads, feature celebrities because celebrities bring attention along with them so they attract more attention to your advertising. However, when everyone does something it no longer stands out.
During the Super Bowl almost every advertisement is laden with celebrities and ‘surprise’ cameos, which makes the approach less effective because none of them stand out. Kantar suggests that whilst celebrities can be powerful in advertising and do attract more attention, they present challenges. Using them as one-offs is tricky because they don’t provide the consistency needed for brand building and they have their own brands which bring along baggage. To leverage them effectively a brand needs to be thinking long term, as with the famous Walkers ads featuring Gary Lineker which lasted for more than a quarter of century.
Equally, the strategic fit between the product and the celebrity, the implied endorsement, can be thin if not fatuous. Steve Stoute founded the agency Translation partially on this insight when he observed that Tiger Woods had been recruited as the celebrity spokesperson for Buick but no one could possibly believe that he drove one. Modern celebrities that are of the moment tend to have a number of brand partners in place. Tennis star Naomi Osaka appears in advertising for more than a dozen different brands, which arguably diminishes the likelihood of brand attribution when seeing her in one.
In order to generate consistency and longer term relationships, brands strike deeper integration deals. This led to Justin Timberlake becoming the ‘creative director’ of Bud Light Platinum and Calloway Golf. Diet Coke recently named Kate Moss its ‘creative director’ but beyond appearing in ads it’s hard for consumers to see what these roles mean. It seems like an honorary title at best but the deeper the integration, the more bound the brand is to that celebrity, which creates the consistency and credibility they crave and comes with added benefits today.
Modern celebrities often have their own significant audiences via social media and sell access to those audiences via simple posts but a deeper partnership means the celebrity is likely to more enthusiastically encourage their fans to buy the products they are involved in. Even more deeply, there are artists who are creative directors working with large brands on new products, and so we come, inevitably, to Kan(Ye) West.
The new media landscape that gives celebrities their own reach also means that it’s practically impossible to get your PR agency to make unfortunate stories about your celebrity partner vanish.
I remember working with a PR agency in London - named after the founder who happens to be descended from the world’s most famous historical psychologist and thus leverages those celebrity associations - and one senior practitioner told me that half their job was sending luxury clothes and such to editors to kill stories about their clients.
Ye co-created successful billion dollar brands with his corporate partners, way beyond simply appearing in advertising, and as such when he started to garner global attention for hate speech, it was inevitably associated with them as well and they severed ties. It’s likely the brands had morality clauses in their contracts. Morality clauses developed to protect companies when a celebrity engaged in conduct that the company thought could damage their brand. These start out very vague as to what is inappropriate and are highly negotiated: must it be a crime or can a Tweet end the deal? According to lawyer turned artist manager Scott Siman in Nashville (also: my father-in-law), just as companies want to protect their brand, so do artists. “Thus we are seeing the rise of “reverse morality clauses” where celebrities are negotiating the right to separate from a company that falls into disrepute or is dealing with a major public backlash.”
A new entrepreneurial approach to managing these complex celebrity-brand relationships has recently emerged. The Rock set up Seven Bucks Creative with a former head of strategy from Droga5 but it’s Ryan Reynolds who has most visibly embraced the advertising industry. He has rapidly become a powerful and inspiring force, both for his own agency’s output, leveraging his own talent, fame and reach, and his new non-profit Creative Ladder, which provides student outreach and training to help make creative careers more accessible to people from diverse backgrounds, a problem that the industry seems to have been unable to solve for itself.
The integration here is much deeper than any celebrity endorsement, since his agency (founded with George Dewey, one of my old ECDs on Verizon at McCann) often makes commercials for brands he either owns or has invested in, like Mint Mobile or Aviation Gin. When he sold the spirit brand to Diageo for $600M he retained a stake, signed on as creative director and remained in their advertising. His approach is reminiscent of the long running series of Remington commercials featuring Victor Kiam, who would famously proclaim that he liked the shaver so much he bought the company.
The Ryan warrant, as it were, has an authenticity that simply featuring a celebrity in advertising doesn’t. So, when considering a celebrity for a brand, rigorously examine their existing persona and how it fits, how to use them to build brand values and assets consistently, and make sure you have a watertight morality clause.
