By Jon Evans, chief customer officer, System1
As marketing teams gear up for the next holiday season or major sporting event, one major question looms: should brands stick with celebrities or create their own stars?
For many brands, celebrities are the cornerstone of their biggest campaigns. More than 50% of Super Bowl ads featured a celebrity in 2023, with recent notable examples including Missy Elliott for Doritos, Maya Rudolph for M&Ms, Ben Affleck for Dunkin’, and Tina Fey for Booking.com. But do these famous faces leave a stronger impression on consumers than brand-owned characters?
While celebrities can offer a boost to short-term sales and long-term brand-building potential, they must be carefully leveraged. Celebrities bring their established followings, evoke powerful emotions, and add a cool factor to the brand. However, merely featuring a celebrity in a commercial and expecting their star power to work magic is a recipe for failure.
Simple endorsements don’t move the needle, nor do ads disconnect from what the celebrity is known for. Without a compelling story, humor, or creative ideas, a celebrity alone can’t save the ad. Sure, Kim Kardashian’s appearance in the 2011 Sketchers ad boosted sales but the two-year partnership is now a fleeting thought in most minds. Celebrities also introduce risk, with their off-set actions potentially impacting brands with which they are associated.
The key is to select the right celebrity and give them material that plays to their strengths—celebrating or subverting their personas in a larger-than-life or comical setting. If you can easily swap one star for another without affecting the ad’s narrative, you’re likely not making distinctive use of the celebrity. If the ad makes no sense without the celebrity, you might be onto something given their presence in the ad plays into the storyline.
Grow Your Own Stars
When thinking about fluent devices, it is best to look beyond celebrities and create your own stars. As Orlando Wood noted in his bestselling book Lemon, using a fluent device—recurring characters with agency—can better connect with customers when used consistently by a brand.
Fluent devices, such as the Geico Gecko or KFC’s Colonel Sanders, build brands by driving fluency—the speed at which consumers recognize a brand. They function like beloved sketch comedy characters who return and delight audiences time after time. Think Saturday Night Live, which thrived on creating a series of memorable characters like Bill Hader’s Stefon and Dana Carvey’s Church Lady who regularly turned up to entertain the audience. Another plus is that owned fluent devices are considerably less expensive than celebrities and that money can go into additional media spend instead.
A great fluent device drives intense, positive emotions by showing them characters they already know and like, delivering a satisfying payoff through running jokes and familiar scenarios. And they quickly signal the brand, enhancing recognition and building mental availability.
Recent consumer testing of Super Bowl ads over the past four years revealed that brand characters consistently outperformed celebrity spots in appeal, brand recognition and commercial impact. Fluent devices scored an average of 3.8-Stars compared to 2.7-Stars for celebrity ads (out of a maximum of 5.9-Stars). Additionally, 88% of viewers remembered the brand in fluent device ads, versus 83% for ads without them—crucial when brands spend millions on their ad buys and need to maximize return on investment.
Fluent devices translate into tangible commercial benefits. Research from Orlando Wood and the IPA found that campaigns featuring a fluent device are 73% more likely to report a large profit gain than those without.
However, to reap these benefits, advertisers need to invest in fluent devices year-round, not just during major advertising moments. Fluent devices require time, patience, and strategy to build. The more familiar they become, the better they work, often taking a few appearances to start showing their effectiveness. The best examples not only turn up in TV ads, but also out-of-home, digital and audio ads, plus packaging and experiential activations to ensure greater branding across different types of media.
A Comeback for Fluent Devices
Fluent devices saw a decline in the 2000s and 2010s but are now making a comeback. Though they require investment and time to see returns, repeating characters and scenarios, like Snickers’ ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry,’ can deliver exceptional brand-building impact.
And best of all, these owned characters are more affordable and less risky than hiring celebrity spokespersons. The savings can be reinvested into enhancing the campaign’s reach. Let a fluent device unlock entertainment and creative effectiveness for your brand by pairing a lovable character with engaging narratives, humor, and cultural references. Once your star is born, you won’t look back.
