Celebrity Endorsement in the Post-Influencer Age
How should a brand choose their spokesperson?
Whaddup y’all — I’m Quinten, a senior director of content at Artemis Ward. Welcome to my column, where I get lost online and return with a new way of understanding what’s going on in the world around us. This month’s topic: brand-celebrity partnerships.
Pretend you work at a creative agency. Let’s say it’s independent, has a track record of doing cool, thoughtful work, and is named after a 19th-century humorist. You’re hard at work one day and a brief crosses your desk: a CPG brand wants your help creating a new campaign. The only requirement? The concept has to feature a celebrity spokesperson. How do you decide who to choose?
First, we need to ask another question. In the age of the algorithm, what even is a celebrity anyway? The most visible person on my feeds is an CIA-whistleblower-turned-serial-podcast-guest. On your feed, it could be a southern singer-songwriter or a fashion model-entrepreneur or a grandpa who gives life advice. And that’s before we even get to capital-C Celebrities, the A-, B-, and C-listers who star in the movies and TV shows we play in the background while we look at our phones.
Criminal records non-withstanding, there’s a case to be made for any of these figures to be the face of a brand. But how are you supposed to pick the right one? Which one is going to help your brand tell the right story?
In its simplest form, storytelling isn’t much more than understanding what symbols mean and how they work together. When you put a handful of symbols in front of an audience, they use their own emotions and experiences to fill in the gaps to create meaning in ways the individual symbols couldn’t on their own. This is why starter pack memes are funny and what makes social media aesthetics take off. It’s also just how marketing works.
Take the myth of the American Cowboy. He (and it’s almost always a he) represents a particular type of rugged individualism. He does what he wants and he does what’s right (in that order), and no matter who you are, there’s some aspect of his life that you’d like to emulate. And because the symbols of the American Cowboy are so well known — boot spurs, wide-brimmed hats, endless skies — it only takes one to conjure up the rest. So what happens, then, when you take that cowboy, spurs and all, and put a Marlboro Red in his hand? You dress him in a pair of Wranglers? You put him behind the wheel of a Ford F-150? Those products too, eventually, become signifiers of the American Cowboy and all he represents, even if functionally, they aren’t all that different from a Pall Mall, a pair of Levi’s, or a Toyota Tundra.
As marketers, our job is to turn products into signifiers. We give them meaning by surrounding them with symbols that represent the qualities we want associated with them. The celebrity spokesperson is no different. While we celebrate different types of celebrities for different reasons, at its core, the celebrity myth is one of status earned through effort, talent, and skill. In a purportedly meritocratic society like our own, this myth is a seductive one. The celebrity — mythically speaking — is proof that hard work pays off, and the products they endorse suggest that you could have for yourself some part of what they’ve achieved.
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Celebrities, they’re just like us. Until they’re not. As traditional celebrity has become increasingly unattainable (and the prominence of the silver screen was supplanted by the intimacy of the black mirror), the internet celebrity has begun to fill the void. For many brands, the internet celeb checked a lot of boxes. They were young, inherently good at social media, and came at a fraction of the cost of their Hollywood counterparts. Most importantly, however, they were “authentic.”
If the traditional celebrity taught us to believe in achievement through hard work, over time, the internet celebrity taught us to believe in achievement without any work at all. As the writer Mia Sato puts it, social media “sells wannabe influencers the myth of infinite opportunities — that you, too, can join this pioneering class of entrepreneurs following their divine destiny to make bank online.”
Like the traditional celebrities that came before them, the influencer is now rarely an aspirational figure. For the rest of us, they’re often symbols of fleeting, involuntary fame, the glaring unfairness of K-shaped society, or a depressing reminder of how easily we can be influenced.
Not all influencers, of course. Sure, we may have our own gripes with the influencer economy, but we all have one or two creators we still love to watch. And there’s a reason why. In the paper Influencer Celebrification, researchers Gillian Brooks, Jenna Drenten, and Mikolaj Jan Piskorski coin the term attention labor to describe “the entrepreneurial work required to secure and monetize audience attention.” Writing, editing, posting for years on end — all of the visible work done before getting famous — is what builds the connection between the most effective internet celebrities and their audiences. And, of course, what allows them to convert that attention labour into celebrity capital.
They write scripts, produce videos, take photographs, create copy, respond to fan comments, engage with fellow influencers, and more. As a generative practice in influencer celebrification, attention labor captures this work required to be an influencer and thus to acquire celebrity capital. Fowler’s “do it yourself” approach to gaining attention further contributed to her perceived authenticity. As she acquired more celebrity capital, she was able to maintain this perceived authenticity, which is appealing to brands and agencies in executing influencer advertising campaigns (Childers, Lemon, and Hoy 2019). This reflects the entrepreneurial nature of attention labor and the potential to then monetize audience attention.
Mr. Beast posted his first YouTube video in 2012. IShowSpeed’s first livestream was in 2017, and Paige Lorenze’s first vlog was in 2018. For these influencers, as with the best celebrity spokespeople, their fame feels earned. That feeling is powerful. It’s what sustains the idea that fame is the result of hard work — the same old meritocratic myth of celebrity, just tweaked a bit for the internet.
But the celebrity endorsement — be it from a traditional or internet celebrity — is a double-edged sword. Their mere existence tells a story in and of itself. And when you put your product next to their face, your audience will fill in the blanks before you have the chance to say anything at all.
So then, with celebrity more fragmented than ever (check out our Link Lariat on this exact topic), how are you supposed to figure out which ones can be the voice of a brand? The voice of your brand? The key, perhaps, lies in viewing the brief through a semiotic lens. What does your audience think when they see the celebrity? What do they communicate without saying a word? Does their status feel enviable or loathsome? Does their success feel earned or undeserved? Is their story one you’re willing to tell?
So let’s say you’re an independent creative agency. Let’s say you’ve been tasked with finding the perfect spokesperson for a CPG brand. Who do you pick? Who did we pick? Stay tuned to find out…
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