Celebrity endorsement for nonprofits can be a costly gamble

Have you ever wondered if the endorsement of a celebrity provides significant dividends to an advertising or marketing campaign? Did you question how much a famous face helps consumers make determinations about a product or service? Also if traditional advertising  results were to be compared with the challenges of gaining donor support for nonprofit fundraising is the value significantly different?

A new study published by ‘Advertising Age’ reveals that while celebrity endorsements can make a huge difference to a campaign typically they don’t perform as well as you may expect. What is true and it is probably commonly anticipated, is that it depends greatly on just who the celebrity is. Some household names exhibit universal success when associated with a product or a cause. Oprah Winfrey being one such example but even she has not lend herself to product endorsements per se but awareness campaigns or similar. The study looks at a detailed matrix of consumer results based upon more than 250 celebrity ads for a wide range of products. Alarmingly some 20 percent actually were proven to yield a negative lift in advertising results and just a small ratio of 12 percent demonstrated a list of greater than 10 percent. The study demonstrates actual results for various celebrities in both the positive and negative fields, timing is everything of course as example such as Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong had the most negative results.

While it wouldn’t be accurate to say that celebrity advertising cannot provide success, the study has opened my eyes to the fact that the entire concept is far more of a gamble than I might have expected. For nonprofits the stakes are even higher, finding a celebrity with a completely untarnished reputation coupled with a high likability factor amongst most demographics is more difficult than it sounds. Celebrity culture has led to public awareness of individual behavior being higher than at any time ever known, in tandem with that the bigger the name the more likely you’ll find a percentage of the public with opinions that are negative.

So does celebrity endorsement for nonprofits provide a viable benefit? It would seem so however the selection process has to be the most scrupulous of tasks that really take into full consideration both your existing and potential donor profile. Even celebrities that I would consider to have a high likability factor ran aground when matched with the wrong campaign. For nonprofits selecting the wrong individual could be a disastrous decision and really who can predict what a celebrity is capable of doing from the time the decision is made to the time the campaign ends?

The full study makes for fascinating reading and was compiled by Ace Metrix.