Posts from the Search Category at AdJab

Do celebrities make a difference in advertising campaigns?

Sure, people remember them. Sarah Jessica Parker was successfully annoying (no really, the ads were that, I'm not just saying it), and we could probably come up with a dozen more. And don't even get me started about Antonio Banderas the bee in Nasonex commercials.

So what's the point of this random banter? Well, T-Mobile USA has stated that it will be removing stalwart ad lady Catherine Zeta-Jones from its commercials and marketing materials when her contract is up next year. The Wall Street Journal's Amol Sharma that in fact, you'll probably see her a lot less than you've been used to.

Maybe she'll be relegated to her head in a little box at the end of ads, saying "Get More" and that's all. This is all in an effort to go "more man-on-street" for the company, apparently. First, Jamie Lee Curtis was the pitchwoman for VoiceStream, now known as T-Mobile, then CZJ hit the scene.

Not a bad couple of choices, as far as celebrities go, but are we seeing a legit backlash to celebrity usage here, in that the company feels that Zeta-Jones isn't selling product or keeping the company top of mind? I'd say the latter shouldn't be the case, because if you ask just about anyone on the street, they'd recognize her from her association with T-Mobile, but "man-on-street" may be similar to how companies are realizing a more one-to-one communication method is more in line with relating to customers, rather than top-down communication.

It'll be different to see T-Mobile spots without her, but as our own Chris Thilk said to me this morning on IM, "most.

useless. celebrity. usage.

ever." That's not to say that he doesn't get that she's recognizable, more that she doesn't sell product. What will Alltel do now?

Last week Steve Rubel what appeared to be a paid Google AdSense ad for, of all things, a Wikipedia entry for the term "crowdsourcing." Rubel wondered why the popular community-edited information source would be advertising since it's information generally has very good to excellent organic search entries. Kevin Newcomb at ClickZ a comment left on Rubel's post from someone who volunteers at Wikimedia, the company that runs Wikipedia, saying the ad did not come from them.

All income, they say, goes into infrastructure and operational costs. So who paid for the ad? There's some speculation that it came from someone who had a link within the entry on "crowdsourcing" who was trying to drive traffic to their site.

But all links have been stripped from that page and yet the ad continues to run. Still a mystery waiting to be solved, it seems.