celebrity rumors | Celebrity Product Placement: A Primer

Celebrity Product Placement: A Primer

Celebrity Product Placement campaigns of this type work best for big-ticket items such as consumer electronics and (the loan of) cars. But with creative approaches, special product questionnaires and generous “Right of Publicity” agreements, marketers can use the celebrity’s name, likeness and opinion as part of their public relations campaigns.

Celebrity Product Placement – via barter agreements – is also among the most affordable ways to use celebrities. For the price of a few products, and sometimes a token honorarium, companies can integrate testimonials into their PR materials and create customized celebrity content for their websites.

They can involve numerous stars in a press campaign for less than the cost of a single paid celebrity spokesperson. It is one of the most under-exploited tactics available to marketers today.

A Case Study: Sony Electronics

The Sony CD Mavica – at the time, the only digital camera offering a built-in CD-Rom – had failed to penetrate the increasingly crowded market for digital imaging products. This was troubling for Sony because the CD Mavica offered clear advantages over its competitors; namely, freedom from wires. But that message had failed to reach the public.

Sony wanted to involve celebrities with their products and for that involvement to influence the public in a meaningful way. They wanted a high-profile event – preferably benefiting charity – upon which to launch a yearlong press campaign in time for the Christmas shopping season. The focus: to promote the simplicity of CD-based photography.

The budget was limited. But, having learned that the latest Sony products could be made available to gift the talent, The Hollywood-Madison Group proposed a Celebrity Product Placement campaign. Each celebrity would be asked to take a picture of what “Freedom” means to them, and those photos would be auctioned off for charity.

Such an artistic challenge, coupled with the prospect of receiving free Sony product, not only served to induce celebrities to participate, but offered us an extraordinary opportunity: to frame these pictures and mount an exhibition which raised money for charity. Indeed, the charity component attracted higher-caliber celebrities and provided the “hook” to draw media attention.

We successfully placed the Sony CD Mavica digital camera with fifteen top stars including Eric McCormack, Alyssa Milano and Dennis Hopper. The photographs were then offered for sale on eBay as part of Wired magazine’s annual charity auction, and put on display at a star-studded event in Los Angeles.

Fifteen top celebrities demonstrated the practical use of Sony’s product and authorized the use of their names, likenesses and opinions about the product for press and marketing purposes (for one year). Sony received free advertising for its product in print and online for three months (worth an estimated $100,000), as well as 3.6 million webpage impressions (auction as a whole) and national press coverage including Entertainment Tonight.

You can read more about this project on our website>celebrity_projects>influencer campaigns.

Conclusion

Celebrity Product Placement offers marketers an exciting way to influence consumer-purchasing decisions. Properly executed, it can be a low-cost, high-return proposition. As such, it should be part of every consumer-marketing program.

Three different approaches offer three different results: gifting-the-talent (narrow focus); product seeding (broad focus) and, barter relationships (one-on-one focus). But, as we have seen, a tightly integrated celebrity product placement campaign, combining elements of each, can improve results and deliver an impressive return on investment.

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