When Is Your Celebrity Spokesperson Overexposed?
Such an interesting question. If you are a brand manager looking for an ambassador to lead your charge against the competition, gain market-share and profits, you in many cases will affix your fortunes to a celebrity. This celebrity must have a large fan base usually articulated via their social media numbers.
When you review a celebrity’s social media demographics for Twitter, Vine, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, SnapChat, Periscope and others, you need to dig deeper and analyze if the celebrities you are reviewing are overexposed. Seems like an oxymoron in some regards. You want a celebrity with enormous pull from an enlightened fan base of potential customers with a pre-disposition to want to buy your companies products and/or services, right?
Absolutely, but when is a good thing too much? Let’s review a couple of high profile celebrities and the decisions they make when it comes to authenticity and being overexposed.
Take a battle of celebrity heavyweights, Katy Perry (Twitter) v. Kim Kardashian (Instagram). You might find some of this information very surprising. In this corner…
Katy Perry: Twitter 71,000,000+ followers
Kim Kardashian: Instagram 37,000,000+ followers
All marketers talk about is engagement, engagement, engagement! You need the consumer to engage with the content, live the lifestyle and buy the product. On June 21, 2015, Katy Perry tweeted about her soon to be released fragrance called Mad Potion through a collaboration with famed fragrance house Coty.
With over 71 million followers what would you deem as a reasonably successful post by Ms. Perry on Twitter about her new and much hyped fragrance? To your surprise, Ms. Perry received only 14,000+ favorites and 8,000+ retweets… Why is this? Could it be that Ms. Perry has dulled the excitement of brand based news to her fan base? Maybe.
Just 6 days before Ms. Perry posted a picture of her for brand Moschino. This pattern has replicated itself frequently for the music star. Remember her Pop Chips campaign! For the launch of her own fragrance, engagement is low, re-tweeting is low as well. With 71 million followers, any reasonable marketer would have expected no less than 100,000 fans favoriting and re-tweeting by say 25-30% of those who favorited. Does that seem unreasonable?
Now take Kim Kardashian who to my surprise will not and does not post commercially to Instagram! Ms. Kardashian was in Cannes as a social media event and told the audience of brand and agency executives that Instagram is off limits to advertisers even to the extent of writing in her endorsement contracts that it is not available!
For someone as overexposed professionally as Ms. Kardashian, taking the stance that one of her most significant social media platforms is solely for her to discuss what she sees, likes and feels is pretty amazing. It is not that Ms. Kardashian is a saint nor is she non-commercial, that would be ludicrous. But it is clear that she has a very strong understanding of developing her brand associated with her authentic lifestyle and creating capacity that is then sold through her other platforms for a premium.
There is no right or wrong, just an interesting analysis of the difference between two media and marketing powerhouses. As new social media platforms find ad generate content as the only way to create enough revenue to keep Wall Street happy, the pressure will be for these type of celebrities to monetize their content before the corporations that own the platforms do it for them.
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