If ever there was a time when celebrity placement was a good idea, it is now. The very concept of celebrity is skyrocketing, as is the need for innovative marketing techniques. Where once the role was filled by glamorous movie stars and a select few athletes, today’s celebrities come from a variety of backgrounds. Some are famous for their acting, to be sure, but others for being rich and obvious, others for being a train wreck, others still for a sex scandal, and others whose careers as performers have been far less attended to than their life in the public eye. In the midst of all this is the gem of celebrity marketing.
Celebrity marketing refers not to marketing celebrities, but rather, of using celebrities in a marketing campaign. The results are both obvious and immediate: using a celebrity gains you more exposure, creates a feeling of trust around your product amongst a certain demographic, and creates a more powerful memory association with your product or service. When a product is endorsed by a celebrity, people notice it. This can work in many ways, but two of the most obvious are the commercial endorsement and the message endorsement. The first is your usual celebrity placement advertisement while the second is a quickly growing field in which celebrities speak up for various causes- whether that is ending world hunger or saving the environment. The point is that when a celebrity lends their voice, a larger audience tends to listen.
These days, there is a growing new segment of celebrity marketing that is happening as the result of the way that people are using media. The mediums in which people are watching television shows, for example, has changed radically over the past five- even two years. Today, people are much more likely to be watching speciality channels or using an online service to view TV shows. This means that broadcast TV marketing is a new game. The online market continues to be hot for the picking, as long as you’re working with the demographic that is likely to be tuning into shows via the Internet rather than watching them on a weekly basis on television.
The key to a designing a successful campaign using talent to bring attention and create trust in your target audience is having the proper resources. That is where an entertainment marketing agency comes in. The leg work, the networking, all of this has already been done by these agencies. They have standing contact with the very talent that you’re looking to find and have experience working with agents and talent to make it happen.
The use of celebrity placement in advertising and PR to promote brands, services, ideas, and causes, is a powerful & effective branding tool, particularly now, with such a growing expanse of media available to which the public landscape is so readily connected.
