Communicate

Print

E-mail

RSS Feeds

Add Comment

Using a celebrity to promote your product or brand is a quick (some might say lazy), expensive and effective way to raise its profile. That’s why so many ads are filled with close-ups of famous faces next to practically any merchandise you can imagine. It seems we’ll buy more of a product – any product – if a person we’ve seen, say, kicking a ball particularly well, or warbling a catchy melody, tells us we should.
 
For social commentators, this “cult of celebrity” is often described as a depressing development. For marketers, it’s awesome news.
 
“Celebrities have a mystical halo around them,” says Ahmed Rady, regional marketing manager of Coca-Cola’s Middle East business unit, which uses Lebanese pop star Nancy Ajram in its marketing. “Their success and their fame mean people look up to them. This is true worldwide, but in the Middle East it’s even bigger, because people here are craving role models of success. We use [celebrities] a lot in our communication, because they are aspirational for a lot of the teens we target.”
 
The formula is simple: Target consumer likes Celebrity X. Marketer wants consumer to like product. Marketer pays Celebrity X large sum of cash to pose with product. Consumer sees picture, buys product, feels a little bit closer to Celebrity X.
 
“The celebrity is like a vehicle that allows you to connect very easily to the target group,” says Eduard Massier, business development and marketing director for emerging markets for Adidas, the German sportswear giant. “Everyone knows what the product or brand will stand for, because they associate it with the celebrity and what they stand for. Nowadays, it’s a fact that emotional connection to a brand is becoming more and more important in order to differentiate it. That’s why endorsement is important.”
 
Rima Chammas, regional marketing director at Pepsi Co., agrees. Pepsi has used several regional celebrities in its ads and recently announced its ambitious Sea of Stars project. “It’s just more likely that if a teenage girl sees Christina Aguilera or Elissa drinking Pepsi, they will also want to drink it,” she says.
 
BRAND IT LIKE BECKHAM
Celebrity endorsement may seem like marketing-by-numbers, but to make the expenditure worthwhile – Adidas is reported to pay David Beckham $4 million a year, to cite one example – marketers must go beyond simply recruiting a famous face. First off, the money spent on signing the celeb has to be backed by hefty media spend.
 
Maria Badilla, head of marketing for local jeweler Damas, says her company’s campaign for its youth-oriented Farfasha range, also featuring Nancy Ajram, cost well over $1 million, although the cost was split with the World Gold Council.
 
“If you plan to use an endorser, you have to make sure that you really spend,” she says. “It takes the media to be able to send the message across so that you are able to achieve your objective. With Farfasha, we really hit the airtime, outdoor, all media to make sure that we created that impact. So now, if you say to any Arab, ‘Nancy,’ it’s ‘Farfasha.’”
 
Aside from the expenditure on traditional advertising, all our experts say that to get the best possible return on investment, it’s crucial that you build a complete marketing plan around the endorsement.
 
“You have to go beyond classical above-the-line activities,” says Massier. Adidas creates specific product lines around its celebrity spokespeople, involving them in the design process, for instance. He also recommends personal appearances. “Activation is very important,” he says. “If you’re using a celebrity for a store opening for example, you create a marketing campaign to promote it, and if there’s good PR afterwards, people really associate the brand with the celebrity in a much stronger way.”
 
Coke’s Rady cites a recent example of how the company’s relationship with Ajram has helped gain publicity in unexpected ways. “At a concert a few days ago, Nancy was singing and some fans were waving Coke signs and stuff, so she stopped in the middle of the concert and said, ‘I’d like to say hello to my Coke fans.’ We didn’t plan that, so it comes over as pretty genuine.”
 
The most common mistake that marketers make, it seems, is failing to select the correct celebrity for their brand.
 
“The worst mistake is when they choose a celebrity solely based on her or his popularity,” says Rady. “You quickly find out if they don’t fit the brand. If, for example, they have completely different values, then your message has lost its credibility. That is the worst thing that you can do, because you basically just ran an ad or a campaign that didn’t help your brand at all.”
 
Massier says Adidas – as a sporting goods manufacturer – is in the fortunate position of being able to position its celebrities as experts. “Credibility is very important,” he says. “But if you consider the credibility that an expert can give you, in 80 to 90 percent of ads you will not be able to see that.” He mentions a Tag Heuer ad featuring F1 driver Fernando Alonso. “The association is great, because Alonso stands for what the watch stands for: toughness, prestige, competitiveness. But if you think about it, is Alonso really qualified to judge that watch? No.”
 
LOCAL HEROES
Ideally, if a brand is looking to establish credibility and emotional connections with Middle Eastern consumers, it makes sense to use a Middle Eastern celebrity with whom the target group’s identification will be stronger. Many brands, however – particularly multinationals – simply import their Western campaigns, complete with Western celebrities.
 
Badilla says Damas deliberately bucked this trend with its Farfasha campaign. “We wanted to really hit the youth market here,” she says. “I think the choice of an Arab pop star was more appropriate. If we chose somebody Western, some would know them and some might not, but with Nancy Ajram the research is unanimous. Any Arab knows her. It gives us consistency: The designs are Arabic, her songs are Arabic, the ad is really Arabic. It wouldn’t make sense to use a Western person.”
 
For Coke, too, Ajram represented an ideal match, Rady says. “Nancy is very youthful, dynamic and cheerful, which matches our optimism message around the brand and the constant search for happiness we communicate.” Unlike many pop stars, he says, parents admire her just as much as teens.
 
Unfortunately, there aren’t many regional household names with that kind of pulling power compared to Europe and the US, according to Adidas’s Massier. The company signed up UAE footballer Ismail Mattar in 2004, but has yet to use him for campaigns outside the country.
 
“Endorsement of people from the region is very important. But there’s not that much potential for localization because there is not much talent around,” Massier says. “For the time being our research and our own experience clearly shows that the global symbols are stronger.
 
“We want to endorse local players because even if they’re not a strong global symbol, we want to show that we are a brand that respects local values, so it’s important to incorporate local symbols,” he adds. “Our dilemma is that it’s difficult to find a celebrity who has pan-Arab reach, because usually the local players are only known in their own country. Here, people suffer a little bit from an inferiority complex. It would be great for the region to have some players, maybe led by Mattar, playing in the top leagues and representing the Middle East.”
 
READY FOR YOUR CLOSE-UP?
While most of those involved in a celebrity campaign are delighted to have signed up a star, there are those for whom a famous face doesn’t carry quite the same thrill: the creatives.
 
“It’s exciting in a way because you get a chance to work with celebrities,” says Prasad Pradhan, senior art director at Grey Worldwide in Dubai, which produced the Farfasha campaign. “But there is no creative leap. It’s basically using their larger-than-life image to build value for that particular brand. It’s not very imaginative and it’s not very different.” At best, he says, you might get to put some creative thought into the photo style, but generally it’s just a case of getting a close-up.
 
With so many international brands using celebrities, you’d think someone might come up with a more creative way of using them in traditional ads. Pradhan, though, doesn’t expect that to happen any time soon.
 
“The whole thing about advertising is basically communicating a message that this product I’m trying to sell is good,” he says. “When you use a celebrity, you’re changing the words of that message so that instead of the brand saying it, it’s a person who has an impact on the target group. You know they’re already influenced by that personality, so if you’re using a celebrity, just make it plain and simple. Make it look good, make it look different, for sure, but don’t go too creative. You already have a hook and that’s the celebrity.”
 
It’s unlikely, then, that many celebrity campaigns are going to win any Cannes Lions, or even Dubai Lynxes. But they will continue to contribute strongly to commercial success.
 
And as the region begins to create more of its own entertainment, with home-grown music and reality shows becoming hugely popular, we’re going to be seeing many more regional faces plastered on our billboards in the near future.

Print

E-mail

RSS Feeds

Add Comment