Is Celebrity Advertising Effective?

Many companies hire Celebrities to endorse their products. Is celebrity advertising effective? Yes, it is more so than it should be. There are good and bad sides to this type of advertising. Having someone famous mention your product can make or break a product.

Celebrity endorsements are a great way get word out about new products or services. Add a celebrity to a television ad for a nonprofit organization and viewers will notice it, before they would someone they have never seen before.

• The endorsements could be bad for a celebrity’s career, the consumer who might purchase it or the company selling the product for several reasons.


• Bad celebrity- if a company picks a celebrity who has a tendency to get in trouble, it could be bad for sales.


• Bad product- the product may not be a quality product or might not what be what it says it is. This could look bad on the celebrity and the consumer will be angry about the dishonesty.

A great example of a deal gone bad: a few years ago, a group of celebrity sisters signed on as the face of a new debit card. Their manager and they, themselves failed to read the fine print on these cards. Consumers would end up spending hundreds of dollars, just to use the cards. There was an outcry. The media shed them in a poor light and sales in all their other products and endorsements dropped. It took time, but they have recovered their image. The upside is that without that celebrity endorsement, the crooked practices of such companies would have remained unnoticed by the public.

Overall, a celebrity advertisement will likely get a product or service noticed one way or the other. Each party must be careful who and what they choose to align themselves with.