16th of February 2024
Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s (brand) relevance?
Given it is the season of marketers donating to celebrities via Super Bowl advertising, I want to talk about using faces as Distinctive Assets. Faces draw category buyer attention because we are social/tribal beings. In any new environment, our attention naturally goes to any faces present. Are they familiar or unfamiliar, friend or foe, do I need to deploy a ‘fight or flight’ response or can I relax? One of the most valuable ways to use a face is to turn it into a Distinctive Asset, so it evokes the brand for category buyers. This makes it both familiar and relevant to the buyer.
The power of a celebrity face as a Distinctive Asset
‘Tis Super Bowl season, where advertisements have an abundance of celebrities, and many of which are ad hoc efforts to grab attention. However, some brands have ongoing paid endorser relationships with celebrities. Dr Cathy Nguyen, Dr Lucy Simmonds and I wanted to see if it was the power of the face, or whether knowing the celebrity’s name made a difference to the celebrity’s strength as a Distinctive Asset.
In an empirical study across celebrity-brand pairs for actors, musicians, and sports stars, we found that if someone could put a name to the celebrity face, they were on average four times more likely to link that celebrity to a brand they were paid to endorse. For example, those who knew that face was Jennifer Aniston were more likely to link her to Aveeno, than those who did not know her (27% versus 5%). Therefore, a celebrity face is a more powerful Distinctive Asset when someone knows their name.
The power of faces to draw attention to advertising
In another project led by Julian Major, we tested whether Distinctive Assets did a better job of drawing attention to an online banner advertisement than the brand name. Included were three face assets with mid-level Fame (% of category buyers that link the brand to the asset). These assets were the faces for Dos Equis, (Uncle) Ben’s and Old Spice.
The experiment involved reading articles on a mock website with online advertising. All respondents saw the same ad with the same face in the same story, the only difference is one group linked the face to a brand, while the other group did not. The test was to if they remembered the advertisement after an unrelated task. If brand relevance doesn’t matter, these scores will be the same.
The results below show that post-exposure advertisement recognition is significantly higher if the face is a Distinctive Asset. Therefore, a previously unknown face works better when it becomes known as a Distinctive Asset.
Read the full article in MediaCat Magazine.
