HEAD BLOG

Following on from my earlier entry on celebrity endorsements for advertising I’d like to focuss on one particular product area: fragrances.

I can’t help but notice that TV ad time is swamped with star-studded endorsements for – The Fragrance (the last resort Xmas present). Ad-slots have heated up despite the snow with James Franco, Vincent Cassell, Josh Harnett, Ewan McGregor, Kiera Knightly, Nichol Kidman, Kate Moss, Beyonce all doing their utmost to convince us to buy the scent they represent.

Actually they are not doing their utmost, in fact they are doing very little but it’s better than just featuring the actual companies behind the product. Yet, is this really the best way to convince the public to buy their fragrance above all others? Especially when (conceptually) they are all the same.

I don’t blame the creatives or the agencies behind the ads; anyone in the ad biz knows the best ideas never get chosen but let’s face it, there’s not even the slightest attempt to stand out.

I get it though. Buy the smell and you’re buying into the glamor of the worlds inhabited by these celebs. Hell, it’s worked in the past and the wisdom here seems to say that if it aint broke… I just thought that maybe the consumer these days was slightly more knowledgeable and cynical about advertising to fall for that old one.

You would think though, that if this is the time of year when sales peak then surely the arena is more competitive.

So why be the same as your rivals?

There is a great opportunity to stand out and be memorable but I smell a rat. Playing safe seems to be the order of the day and in these times of accountability a good defense for decision makers is “well they do it, so why don’t we?”. Safety in numbers and all that.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe they all smell the same, and so the ads are all the same. It could be an honest approach to advertising.

And that, my friends, stinks.

Good creativity is full of risk. But such a direction seems to be in direct contradiction to the message of despair and cynicism that currently prevails. Steve Henry of HHCL questions the use of celebrities in advertising during a time of recession saying, whilst acknowledging the escapism value of such strategies, that they don’t represent the best way of talking to people. Rich people advertising cheap food – where’s the connection between brand and consumer there?

Celebrity based advertising (generally speaking) is just one of those fallback positions for Creatives. They are easy propositions which show conservatism in full swing. The reasoning seems to be that by shoe-horning Celebrity D into Brand A there is no risk, or at least a reduced risk. There is a degree of truth to that. Safe advertising done well can be effective, of course it can, and wild, risky ideas can fail miserably. I’m sure Gillette’s “star-studded” tour de force may well have sales to back up its strategy.

More often than not this form of advertising, whether it is stapling Richard Hammond to a supermarket trolley or forcing Ant and Dec into other people’s made-up lives, has to remain true to the basics of good advertising and use their celebrities for solid, persuasive reasons and not because they are flavour of the month or, worse still, flavour of the marketing exec’s better half.

At the start of the year my colleague, Carl Pugh, wrote about how best to tackle a year in which the word ‘recession’ would feature heavily. Five months in and the news media seems confused as to whether it should be reporting we will emerge in 2010 or whether we’ll sink under the weight of the trillion pound debt. I’ll leave the future to the kids and focus instead on another aspect of the article – celebrity advertising. Why? Well because I just read a story about Susan Boyle. Read more…