Do advertisers substitute celebrity for creativity?

Be noticed. Be remembered.

That's the simplest way to explain advertising's goal. I took that from Dave Trott. The inimitable Trott also likes to point out that advertisers typically fail at that goal. 9/10 times to be precise. * I will note here that Trott never appears to source this data. But, if you consider the percentage of ads ignored and then layer on what we know about brand attribution and/or recall then it is quite plausible.

9/10 is an exceptionally high failure rate. So it makes sense that advertisers might try anything to turn the odds in their favour. One increasingly popular and expensive option? The power of celebrity. But are brands getting a return on their investment?

The celebrity endorsement has been around for almost a century - one of the first endorsers was Babe Ruth. 'The Babe' grew his own celebrity through brands - his image was everywhere, and his legend grew.

For athletes, these partnerships offered important additional income (especially since for most of last century they were undervalued and underpaid by their 'owners'). But for many years endorsement was seen tacky among the upper echelons of celebrity - the A-list.

This has all changed in the past decade. A-listers are now endorsers, owners, and investors in brands now. Athletes (and Ryan Reynolds) are trying their hand at opening advertising agencies and production companies. They no longer have to hide their brand affinities (and big paycheques) in Asia like they did in the 80s and 90s; if you've never gone down the Japanese celebrity endorsement ad YouTube rabbit hole I'd strongly suggest starting here...

This ad is incredible. It's for slot machines. Nick Cage had been shilling for Pachinko for a while (becoming a brand asset) and appears to have just told them "I got this." And you know what? I think he did.

All this extra opportunity is great for the celebrities, but are the brands getting what they paid for? Celebrity is sure to get you noticed, but will it get you remembered? A celebrity 'announcement' is great for an initial PR hit, but will customers attribute it back to the brand, and will the endorsement drive sales over the long term?

There was actually a pretty significant study done on this about a decade ago by Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse and Barclays Capital analyst Jeroen Verleun. The study found that a celebrity endorsement increases a company’s sales an average of 4% relative to its competition. This impact does diminish over time. That sounds pretty good, but remember, it's relative to competition. Not an absolute 4% increase. As well, notice that the 'sample' is exclusively top-tier athletes (Maria Sharapova, Tiger Woods etc.).

Here's the thing - that kind of relative increase is often exceeded by regular old creative advertising. And if we made our sample exclusively the top-performing and most impactful work? Then yeah, we'd blow it out the water (and for a much smaller investment).

Advertisers consistently underestimate the impact of creative quality on their business (they also really value something called 'multimedia'? That sounds like something from the CD-ROM era... but I guess we can only assume means literally having many different medias). But why do they overestimate the impact of celebrity?

Why are they willing to shell out for the stars while we're left begging for scraps?

There is of course the basic human need for status / reputation. Hanging out with / being associated with a celebrity sounds pretty cool (cool? say the investors...)! But advertising's celebrity obsession also feels like it has run parallel to the movie industry's obsession with existing IP. The movie biz has become obsessed with just creating stories people are already familiar with. Make a movie about Garfield, or remake Space Jam and you will at least get noticed - that's guaranteed. Whether it's any good (and remembered)? Who cares. It's why the auteurs and creative talent has fled to "episodic work" (honestly I don't know what we call 'tv' these days). Interesting that one side of this equation is bleeding cash and the other is printing money.

It may sound like I disagree with using celebrity in advertising. I don't. Celebrity can be used in wonderful and ingenious ways in advertising (See: "Vax that thang up" or any number of old Snickers commercials). But I see far too many brands getting lazy. They rely on a brief PR splash rather than creating a brand asset out of a long term relationship (See: Matthew McConaughey's strange but oddly effective Lincoln relationship).

In the sponsorship business there's an old maxim - to maximize your ROI spend the same amount on activating the partnership as you did on creating it. That means using your asset to create consistently great and engaging work. To get noticed AND remembered.

Because for every great celebrity Snickers ad, there's many more like Bob Dylan x Victoria's Secret (yes, as troubling as it sounds) or Kim Kardashian x Charmin toilet paper, or this, from OG celeb investor/spokesperson - Ashton Kutcher - where his creative recommendation was apparently to go full racist. Those are certainly noticeable executions.

Cameron Stark is Partner, Brand Growth + Operations at creative, branding, and design collective Hard Work Club.