Celebrity challenge

"Competing supermarkets have found an increase in the sale of ingredients Jamie oliver mentions (in adverts paid for by Sainsbury’s!)" Guest columnist this month: Martin Isark

Where are the world’s A-list celebrities when it comes to advertising drink in the UK?  George Clooney advertises Martini vermouth and José Mourinho is the profitable face of the real cork campaign, showing that at last a couple of marketeers have thought outside the “wine-box”. But where are the A-list faces in our wine and spirit advertising?

Has no one thought that David Beckham drinking, say, Riesling might be a real pound-puller?  Is anybody out there?

So it might cost a few million quid. But the right celebrity endorsement can pull in much more than the same amount spent through the regular channels. For example, just do a bit of Googling and you’ll find that football manager Mourinho has around 27,000 cork-related mentions in just a few weeks, which is very probably more than all the drinks writers put together! While Martini Man Clooney is now also giving an extra kick to Nestlé’s Nespresso by starring in that advertising campaign.

Of course it‘s a risk when you put all your grapes in one basket, and an A-list celebrity would certainly take a large chunk of most marketeers’ budgets. But there are areas of the drinks industry that have been failing for the last 10 years and more. Take Sherry and Cognac. They seem to have tried every promotional and marketing trick available but there they are still bumping along the bottom of today’s drinkers’ wish list. Consider Freddy Flintoff chilling out with a fino Sherry or Kevin Costner preferring a Cognac when he’s finished filming – or any other suitable scenario featuring an A-lister. That would surely have more impact than anything that’s been tried so far.

We’ve all witnessed how successfully celebrity advertising works for food. Jamie Oliver, for example, is a respected expert as well as being a television celebrity and Sainsbury’s has benefited big time from his association. Now, though, as Sainsbury’s adverts have become more broad based, showing completed dishes rather than promoting single products, there has been an interesting knock-on effect: competing supermarkets have also found in their stores an increase in the sale of ingredients Oliver mentions (in adverts paid for by Sainsbury’s!)  Nice one. Too bad that the drinks industry does not have an  Oliver – or a Gordon Ramsay or Delia Smith – and is unable to go down this route even if it wanted to. High time it found a similarly credible A-list celebrity to compete on this stage!

Jamie Riggs, the managing director of Brand Exposure Product Placement, suggests the way forward for the drinks industry is celebrity product placement in films rather than in straightforward advertising. Obviously, for a product to work for the company, the film and the actor have to be right. He cites the film The Firm (1993), where Tom Cruise visits Gene Hackman in the Cayman Islands and, at Hackman’s suggestion, takes a Red Stripe from the fridge – a simple action that could happen in real life. “No wonder,” says Riggs, “that, within a month of the film’s release, Red Stripe sales in the US had increased by more than 50%.”

Product placement
It’s certainly cheaper to have A-list actors endorsing a product on film or TV than for them to appear in an advert. Unfortunately, in the UK (unlike the US), the product placement restrictions on television programmes are prohibitive – and are regarded as a non-starter if you require overt advertising. Most things, though, are up for grabs in the films industry, both UK and US, although for anything other than the blue-chip films (James Bond films would be the perfect example) your product placement must be seen as a risky punt. And it would require plenty of other marketing as back-up.

There is no guarantee that an A-list celebrity would increase your sales as comprehensively as Cruise and Hackman did with Red Stripe but they would give your product publicity unachievable through regular advertising.  There is, of course, always a risk that during the advertising campaign your celebrity might get into a spot of bother (as Kate Moss did, for example) and your brand could be tarnished. The other possibility is “great voice, but no throat”, an advertising phrase for a mega-advert with an A-list celebrity, which everybody loves but which makes no impact on sales.

The attitude to adverts over the last couple of years has certainly changed. It is no longer the graveyard for has-beens. British comedian Peter Kay has raised his profile big time by doing the John Smith’s Extra Smooth adverts. Indeed it has now become fashionable in the US for the A-list to make an appearance in commercials: the latest in the alcohol sector is actor Brad Pitt, who is featuring in a clever Heineken advert, though as yet there are no plans to bring it to the UK. Perhaps there is still hope for Riesling with the very fashionable David Beckham… 

© db July 2006