Celebrities and successful advertising - a combination that seems to be almost a law of nature for many marketers. At the very least, the number of testimonial campaigns is steadily increasing, as a current
Study by CPI Celebrity Performance shows. Successful athletes in sports that attract large audiences are particularly popular, as they usually promise textbook testimonial characteristics: good looks, general awareness, a high reputation among the sports-enthusiast target group and, ideally, charisma. The typical image of a competitive athlete does the rest: (self-)discipline and ambition combined with youth and above-average success. What company wouldn't want these qualities to be transferred to its products or, in the best case, to the entire brand?
Athletes - credible but expensive
Empirical studies seem to prove marketers who rely on the athlete factor right. For example, a study published in 2012 by the Harvard Business School put the average increase in sales from using star athletes as brand ambassadors at four percent. According to a study by the ESB Business School at Reutlingen University, athletes are also rated as more credible in conveying advertising messages than prominent actors, singers and politicians. However, the use of a top athlete as a brand ambassador is usually associated with exorbitant advertising fees. For example, according to Forbes, tennis ace Roger Federer earned a total of more than 40 million dollars through contracts with Nike, Credit Suisse, Mercedes-Benz and Gillette, among others. However, if there is not a sufficient fit between the product and the athlete, or if consumers eventually only remember the athlete and not the advertised brand when they see an athlete who has already advertised chips, sausages and headphones, there is a risk that the expensive testimonial campaign will be lost in the mass of countless celebrity commercials. In the best case, the advertising company then sinks a lot of money into the sand; in the worst case, the image of the brand also suffers. Not to mention that smaller companies with a low advertising budget or start-ups cannot afford top athletes as testimonials.
Free brand ambassadors: image booster?
How practical it would be to be able to profit from the image of a well-known athlete without a multimillion-dollar contract and thus without financial risk - ideally with maximum authenticity of the testimonial. Wishful thinking? Not necessarily. You just have to be really lucky as a company, like the fashion label Superdry, for example. Thanks to the unpaid support of advertising and soccer icon David Beckham, its products gained worldwide attention. In 2005, co-founder James Holder discovered the then-new David Beckham calendar in the window of a stationery store purely by chance. And what was prominently displayed on the cover? The English soccer star in a blue T-shirt with the inscription "OSAKA 6," which Holder himself had designed for his then two-year-old start-up. The then still young company, which to this day does not enter into endorsement contracts with celebrities, would probably never have been able to afford an advertising contract with Beckham. But Beckham, who would often be spotted in Superdry clothing, brought Superdry more than just international attention. The free "testimonial advertising" of the stylish soccer star also offered an authenticity that paid campaigns, by their very nature, struggle to convey: Consumers trust a Nielsen survey According to company-independent recommendations from friends and acquaintances, as well as ratings in online comments, are generally much stronger than classic forms of advertising. A more or less randomly taken picture of a celebrity wearing a new label, driving a fast car or eating an appetizing-looking burger is a top-class recommendation independent of the company. The better known and more exemplary the sportsman or celebrity pictured, the better.
Land Rover, for example, was probably delighted to receive free support from Manchester United star Wayne Rooney: Numerous pictures and articles about the striker and his customized Range Rover circulated on the net. Rooney is even said to have preferred the Range Rover to luxurious cars from the official Manchester United sponsor Chevrolet. The example thus also shows that expensive sponsorship campaigns always involve a certain risk. According to the Mail, the Chevrolet campaign, which cost around 53 million euros, was probably not helped by the involuntary promotional trips of the Briton and his teammates, who were also spotted in their Porsche and Mercedes cars.
Unauthorized images can be expensive
Passive and free promotion of brands by athletes and other celebrities sounds tempting, but in the end it resembles a game of chance, because of course it cannot be foreseen or even specifically planned. Nor should companies, in the first flush of happiness in view of the photo of a top athlete in newly released running shoes that has just surfaced, throw all caution overboard and uninhibitedly disseminate the "proof photos" via their own website and social media. "Appropriate images may only be procured and used if the person depicted has given his or her consent to do so; anything else would be a violation of the right to one's own image. If it is a question of using images for advertising purposes, an explicit declaration of consent from the person concerned is necessary," Dr. Andreas Meili, a lawyer for media and advertising law in Zurich, points out. "It is true that a prominent person must put up with greater encroachments on his or her personal rights than normal persons; however, this only applies if such encroachments are covered by an overriding public interest. However, the procurement and use of images of celebrities with products is not in the overriding public interest, but in the private advertising interest of the product supplier concerned." In such a case, the unauthorized procurement and use of such images consequently constitutes an unlawful violation of personality, Meili said. Even the use of the name of celebrities, which primarily serves to advertise the provider's products, is only permissible if the celebrity in question has consented to it. In addition, many celebrities have concluded exclusive advertising contracts with certain product providers and earn good money with them. "That's why they usually also defend themselves against third parties who want to use their name and image as unsolicited advertising media," says Meili.
The FAZ had to experience this painfully firsthand. Tennis star Boris Becker sued the publisher because the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung had featured his picture alongside the headline "Der strauchelnde Liebling" ("The stumbling darling") without authorization on a fictitious front page in the fall of 2001 as part of the advertising campaign to launch the paper. The Munich Regional Court ruled in favor of the former tennis idol and ordered the newspaper publisher to pay Becker 1.2 million euros plus interest.
In Meili's experience, comparable cases with Swiss celebrities usually end in settlements, i.e. do not go to court, because the legal situation is relatively clear. Nevertheless, the free advertising that seems so practical can quickly become really expensive. Companies that discover photos of well-known athletes, actors or politicians using their products can certainly hope that the image material will spread through media coverage or social media without their intervention and thus boost the awareness and popularity of their own brand. However, from a legal point of view, you can hardly become active yourself. Nevertheless, brands that ensure recognition value through their design or eye-catching logos create the best preconditions for the fact that, in the case of a prominent customer seen with the product, a piece of the customer's awareness will radiate to them even without their own intervention.
Jessica Kliem studied political science at the Free University of Berlin. After a traineeship in the publishing industry, she is currently with the English agency Searchlaboratory active in the field of online marketing.
