Choose your Celebrity With Care
The $5 million we spent on Oprah Winfrey may not have yielded the results we had hoped for but does that mean that using popular identities to market tourism don’t work?
A marketing professor once explained to the writer while studying at uni that using a celebrity for marketing purposes needed careful thought. No matter, she explained, what celebrity you selected, one third of your target market liked that personality, one third hated them and the other third were either totally indifferent or had never heard of them. So there you have it.
That was clearly exemplified when Tourism Australia used Lara Bingle to front a major campaign a few years ago. It was probably doomed any way because it was targeting a global audience of vastly differing cultures, expectations and, not to mention, language difficulties. Poor old Lara may have been unfairly treated by the problems of translating Where the hell are you Australian idiom into other languages.
But, it was also very obvious that a large proportion of the target audience had no idea who Lara Bingle was and her abundance of visual appeal was unable to overcome that problem.
There are dozens of similar disasters in the advertising world (especially tourism for some strange reason) where using famous personalities just didn’t pay off.
However celebrity marketing can work.
Online bookings for Mantra have increased by 30% since a new campaign featuring former Australian of the year and all-round nice guy, Pat Rafter commenced on July 10. Mantra’s director of marketing Ken Minnikin said, “Since the campaign has been running, the number of searches for the word ‘Mantra’ on the web is up 21% over the past few weeks and 63% up on last year.
These figures are encouraging and show that the Pat Rafter campaign has motivated holidaymakers to get online to research and book a holiday,” said Mr Minnikin.
The $5 million campaign is Australia’s largest accommodation marketing campaign and involves television, radio, print, digital and PR elements. Pat Rafter, former world number one tennis player, captain of the Australian Davis Cup team, father of two and brother to eight, has signed a three-year deal with Mantra with a variety of campaigns being rolled out over this time.
There is always a risk of using a celebrity in a marketing campaign, not just because of the professor’s one third-one third-one third theory, but every celebrity because of the intense media scrutiny they are constantly under, runs the risk of any indiscretion on their part becoming a national (or sometimes international) scandal – warranted or not. Any advertiser using that celebrity will instantly become tarnished by the same public scrutiny afforded to that persona. Just look at Charlie Sheen’s current predicament.
The trick is clicking onto the right celebrity at the right time! The ATC back in the dark ages did just that with Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan’s shrimp on the barbie campaign. But how many other similar crusades can you think of that were so successful in the tourist arena. Strangely, few.
Certainly Oprah Winfrey does not seem to be destined for that illusive successful list.
Oh well, there is always another heart throb just around the corner… maybe Julia or Tony?
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