Brands creating content can learn from celebrity scandals when looking to develop content strategy.
A Marketing Week feature recently claimed that celebrity endorsements are dead. Just as consumers are increasingly looking to engage and seek conversations with brands, these same brands are looking to increasingly engage and converse with celebrities too. Brands no longer just want a celebrity face; they want their creative input too. Or so the article goes.
The article cites people like Alicia Keys becoming global creative director at BlackBerry, Justin Timberlake and a host of other celebrities like Beyonce and Diddy doing multi-million pound tie-ups with major brands.
The opportunities for creating branded content with a celebrity on board are many and obvious from a brand point of view. The celebrity receives cash to carry out their respective creative activity; the brand gets a nice shine from association with their content – music, movies, video clips, books, online events. It’s win win. Almost.
But there are a few things that anyone that creates content needs to be aware of when going down the celebrity route. The number one fact is that celebrities are fallible.
Celebrities can damage your brand
Let’s look at what must be the biggest fall from celebrity-grace ever in the UK. In the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s, Jimmy Saville had a peerless reputation in the UK. He was universally liked; brands no doubt back then wanted to associate themselves with him. Fast forward to 2013 and any association is about as toxic to a brand as you can get.
The BBC’s reputation has surely suffered. But imagine if Saville had been as heavily branded as some modern celebrities are? Look at what is happening with Oscar Pistorius and his sponsors in the wake of his murder charge.
Any brand thinking about embracing a celebrity or well known figure operating in their niche space, either as a spokesperson, advertising figure, brand advocate or as is increasingly the trend celebrity CMO, remember that celebrity figures are fallible and public opinion changes over time. So choose your celebrity carefully.
Celebrity centred branded content
Even if you are creating content around a celebrity, rather than using that celebrity to promote your brand, ask yourself the question – do we want to be associated with this figure? And if we do now, will we still want to in 5, 10 or 20 years time?
Think about all those articles about celebrity-style, celebrity gossip, celebrity hangouts and celebrity lifestyles that tabloids and magazine publishers love to create because celebrities sell papers and magazines; do they work for your brand? They probably will generate visitors to your website – if you are the right sort of consumer facing brand and if you promote it properly - but the association can be powerful if it goes wrong.
Yes, brands need to think like publishers for content marketing success: but the right sort of publishers. Don’t go chasing the content rainbow for the sake of creating content. Think about your brand strategy.
Content remains online for a very long time
We all know the saying, which probably doesn’t make sense to some people; ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper’; this used to be the case in the age of print – very few people had a record to hand of what was said about something and by whom. Today, everything that is written online, and much that was written before the advent of the digital age thanks to media companies putting their archives online, can all be found online.
There is a record of what was written and when. Look back and read these articles, written at the time of Savilles’ death, The Mirror – Jimmy Saville Dead; The Sun – Jimmy Saville Obituary - am sure the writers and editors would cringe on re-reading this. Yorkshire Telly could really do with updating his content too. Imagine the damage a gushing branded video of Saville doing the rounds on YouTube could do.
This is important in the digital age, when any blogger with a search engine can dig up everything on a brand in a matter of minutes – and they have the tools to distribute what they create in a couple of minutes more – and this is something that brands should think about a little bit more when determining brand strategy.
Dale Lovell
