Celebrities Can Be Effective for Brands, but I’m Not Interested
The Super Bowl was earlier this month which means we not only got to see the best that the NFL has to offer but ostensibly, the best the advertising industry has to offer as well. This year, over 50% of the commercials at the Super Bowl featured a celebrity, a trend that’s been increasing over the last five years (with celebs appearing in an average of ~40% of the spots from 2020–2023). Ads featuring celebrities can be effective for brands but as someone who loves creativity, working with celebrities doesn’t interest me.
Some of the celebrity Super Bowl spots were creatively strong. The CeraVe spot with Michael Cera had a nice tie to the brand name (although I thought the social and digital work leading up to the Super Bowl was better than the spot itself) and the Arnold Schwarzenegger State Farm spot was particularly strong because it included the existing State Farm brand elements (Jake and the red polo) and used Schwarzenegger’s famous accent to reinforce the brand tagline, “like a good neighbaaa State Farm is there.” But too many of the celebrity Super Bowl spots simply featured celebrities without much of a creative idea.
According to System 1, the most effective ad in the Super Bowl was the Michelob Ultra spot that featured soccer star Lionel Messi (it scored a 4.8 on it’s 5.9-point scale). Warc called it, “[a single] idea executed brilliantly.” The only problem with that statement is that, there was no idea. The spot opens with Messi at a beach bar that has just run out of Michelob Ultra and instead of ordering a different beer, he plays soccer until the tap is refilled. The idea was basically, ‘put Messi in the spot (along with Jason Sudeikis and Dan Marino).’ It’s fair to ask the question, why does it matter that there was no creative idea if the spot was the most effective at the Super Bowl? The answer is, according to the New York Times, Michelob Ultra paid Messi $14 million to do the spot (not to mention what they also had to pay Marino and Sudeikis).
Featuring celebrities in advertising is more like media buying than creative. In media buying, agencies sell space based on guarantees of not only reach and frequency but often of brand ATU metrics as well. Essentially, you get exactly what you pay for. I’ve always felt like the job of creativity in advertising then was to help a brand do better than it’s media plan would suggest based on the content it puts into that media plan. Creative of course, has no guarantee of effectiveness though (even with creative testing). Good creative ideas and bad creative ideas alike will cost about the same and it’s up to marketers to discern what will be most effective. That’s where celebrities come in. Instead of doing true creative work to maximize a media spend, brands can look to celebrities to fill the void. Similar to the media plan calculation, celebrities command payments commensurate with how popular they are and how many people they’re likely to influence to take a brand action. Just like with media, you get what you pay for.
The media buy is usually far-and-away the most expensive part of advertising. In the case of Michelob Ultra though, it won the most effective ad at the Super Bowl by paying more for the content of its spot than the already astronomical $14 million dollars for the 60-second media buy. Again, it can be said that Michelob Ultra got what it paid for and there’s nothing wrong with that. Except that it didn’t really require any creativity.
I was working on a celebrity project not too long ago and the Creative Director said something in passing that could have summed up this article in seven words, “we’re just paying them to be them.” That’s exactly what Michelob Ultra did, it just paid Messi to be Messi and the brand happened to be there. Getting to great creative work is why I love my job and I take pride in doing it. If your idea of creative is simply paying a celebrity to be themselves, it may work well for your brand but you don’t need me for that. I’d rather work on something else.