Ads with Celebrities: When They Work and When They Don’t

Ads with celebrities can accelerate brand growth or quietly drain a media budget, depending almost entirely on whether the partnership is built on commercial logic or vanity. The celebrity is not the strategy. They are a distribution mechanism for a strategy that either exists or doesn’t.

I’ve seen this from both sides. Early in my career I sat in enough creative brainstorms to watch rooms full of smart people get seduced by a famous name before anyone had asked the harder question: what specific commercial problem does this solve? That question doesn’t kill good ideas. It kills expensive bad ones.

Why Marketers Keep Reaching for Celebrity Endorsements

Celebrity advertising has been a fixture of brand-building for over a century. The commercial logic, at its most basic, is borrowed equity. You attach a trusted, admired, or aspirational figure to your brand and some of their cultural weight transfers across. It is not a complicated idea. The complications come in execution.

The pull toward celebrity is also partly structural. Brand teams face a recurring problem: how do you get noticed in a saturated media environment? A recognisable face is a reliable shortcut to attention. Attention is the precondition for everything else in advertising, so the instinct is not irrational. It becomes irrational when attention is treated as the outcome rather than the starting point.

There is also a boardroom dynamic worth acknowledging. Celebrity campaigns are easy to present. They generate internal excitement. They get approved faster than abstract brand strategy work. I have watched genuinely mediocre campaigns sail through sign-off because the client was excited about the talent, and I have watched tighter, sharper work get stuck in review cycles because it was harder to visualise. The celebrity is often as much an internal sales tool as it is a consumer one.

If you are building or reviewing a go-to-market approach, the broader thinking behind how celebrity fits into brand and growth strategy is worth working through. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full commercial picture, of which celebrity is one tactical component.

What Makes a Celebrity Partnership Actually Work

The campaigns that deliver commercially tend to share a few characteristics that have nothing to do with how famous the celebrity is.

First, there is genuine category relevance. When someone who is credibly associated with a category endorses a brand within it, the endorsement carries weight. When there is no natural connection, the celebrity becomes decoration. Decoration gets noticed. It rarely persuades.

Second, the best partnerships have longevity. A one-off campaign generates awareness. A sustained relationship builds association. Association is what actually moves brand metrics over time. The brands that have used celebrity most effectively, across categories from sportswear to luxury to FMCG, have typically committed to a face for long enough that the pairing becomes instinctive in the consumer’s mind.

Third, and this is the one that gets skipped most often, the celebrity has to be willing to be genuinely part of the brand’s story rather than simply appearing in it. There is a visible difference between talent who has been briefed and talent who has been involved. Consumers are not naive. They can read the transaction.

When I was at the agency running large-scale campaigns across multiple categories, the briefs that produced the strongest work were the ones where the client had already done the hard thinking about why this person, for this brand, at this moment. The briefs that produced expensive mediocrity were the ones where the celebrity had been selected and the brief was written around them. That is the wrong order of operations.

The Fit Problem: Why Famous Is Not Enough

Fame is a reach multiplier. It is not a persuasion mechanism on its own. This distinction matters enormously when you are deciding where to put budget.

Fit operates on several dimensions simultaneously. There is demographic fit: does the celebrity’s audience overlap meaningfully with your target customer? There is values fit: do the associations this person carries align with what the brand stands for? And there is credibility fit: would a reasonable person believe this individual actually uses or cares about this product?

Credibility fit is the one that collapses most visibly when it goes wrong. A luxury watch brand that signs a celebrity known for conspicuous spending has credibility fit. The same brand signing a celebrity known primarily for social media comedy does not, regardless of how large their following is. The audience size is real. The persuasive transfer is not.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years. The effectiveness work that came through involving celebrity consistently showed the same pattern: campaigns where fit was tight and the creative gave the celebrity something real to do outperformed campaigns built around fame alone, often by a significant margin on brand and sales metrics. Fame gets you in the room. Fit is what closes the deal.

This is also where the rise of creator-led marketing has been genuinely instructive. Platforms like Later have documented how creator partnerships in go-to-market campaigns can outperform traditional celebrity on conversion metrics specifically because the fit is tighter and the audience trust is higher. The creator’s audience chose to follow them. That opt-in relationship is commercially different from passive celebrity exposure.

The Upper-Funnel Trap and Why It Matters for Growth

Here is a tension I spent years working through in my own thinking. Earlier in my career I was, like most agency people of that era, focused heavily on the lower funnel. Performance channels, measurable outcomes, cost-per-acquisition. The logic seemed airtight. You could see what was working.

What I came to understand, slowly and through watching client growth curves flatten, was that a lot of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. You are capturing people who were already on their way to buying. The channel gets the attribution. The brand work that put the brand in their consideration set gets nothing.

Celebrity advertising, done well, is fundamentally an upper-funnel investment. It builds the mental availability that makes lower-funnel conversion possible. The problem is that this relationship is hard to measure directly, which makes it easy to cut when budgets come under pressure and easy to over-invest in when the business wants to feel like it is doing something bold.

Think about how retail actually works. Someone who walks into a shop and tries something on is far more likely to buy it than someone browsing online without that physical engagement. The act of trying on changes the probability of purchase. Celebrity advertising, when the fit is right, does something analogous in the mind. It creates a low-friction first engagement with the brand that makes later conversion more likely. The performance channel then captures that conversion and claims the credit.

This is not an argument against measurement. It is an argument for honest measurement that does not systematically undervalue brand work because it is harder to attribute. Forrester’s intelligent growth model has long made the case that sustainable growth requires building brand alongside capturing demand, not treating them as competing priorities.

Risk Is Real: What Happens When the Celebrity Becomes the Story

The downside of celebrity partnerships is not abstract. When the celebrity becomes the story for the wrong reasons, the brand is caught in a situation it did not create and cannot fully control.

This risk is structurally different from most marketing risks. A bad campaign can be pulled. A poor product can be reformulated. A celebrity in a public controversy is a reputational event that unfolds in real time, in public, and the brand’s association is already established. The speed of social media has compressed the window between a celebrity story breaking and brand damage occurring to hours rather than days.

Due diligence processes have become more sophisticated in response to this. Reputable agencies now run background processes that go well beyond public profile checks. But the honest position is that no process eliminates the risk entirely. You are always, to some degree, betting on a person’s future behaviour.

The contractual response to this, morality clauses and termination rights, provides legal protection but not reputational protection. By the time a morality clause is invoked, the association has already been made in the public mind. The clause ends the financial relationship. It does not undo the brand connection.

This is one of the practical reasons why longer-term, lower-profile partnerships with creators who have smaller but more engaged audiences can be commercially sensible even for large brands. The risk surface is smaller. The audience relationship is more durable. And the cost structure allows you to diversify across multiple partnerships rather than concentrating risk in a single high-profile name.

How to Structure a Celebrity Campaign That Has Commercial Logic

The brief is everything. Not the creative brief, which comes later. The commercial brief that defines what the campaign is supposed to do, for whom, and how you will know if it worked.

Start with the specific problem. Is this a brand awareness challenge in a new market? Is it repositioning away from an existing perception? Is it driving trial in a category where consideration is low? Each of these requires a different type of celebrity relationship and a different creative approach. Treating them as interchangeable is how you end up with campaigns that look good in the pitch and underperform in market.

Define the audience before you define the talent. This sounds obvious. It is routinely ignored. The talent selection should follow from an audience analysis, not precede it. Who are you trying to reach? What do they watch, follow, and trust? Which celebrities or creators exist at the intersection of your target audience and your brand values? That intersection is where the shortlist starts.

Build in measurement from the start. Brand lift studies, search volume tracking, social listening, and sales data in the relevant period all contribute to an honest picture of what the campaign delivered. No single metric tells the full story. The combination of metrics, triangulated honestly, gets you close enough to make better decisions next time. Semrush’s work on growth examples illustrates how brands have used multiple signals to evaluate brand-building campaigns rather than relying on single-channel attribution.

Plan for the long version. A single campaign with a celebrity is a transaction. A sustained partnership is a brand asset. If the budget only supports a one-off, be honest about what a one-off can realistically achieve, which is usually less than the pitch deck suggests.

Celebrity vs. Creator: Choosing the Right Model for Your Brand

The distinction between traditional celebrity and creator talent has become less clear over the past decade. Some creators have larger audiences than traditional celebrities. Some traditional celebrities have built creator-style presences. The more useful distinction is between talent whose audience is broad and passive versus talent whose audience is narrow and actively engaged.

Broad and passive reach is valuable for mass-market brands with large budgets and long time horizons. The goal is mental availability at scale. You need a lot of people to see the brand associated with this person over an extended period. That requires traditional media weight and traditional celebrity reach.

Narrow and actively engaged reach is valuable for brands where trust is a primary purchase driver, where the category requires explanation or demonstration, or where the target audience is specific enough that mass reach is wasteful. In these cases, a creator with 200,000 highly engaged followers in the right demographic will outperform a celebrity with 20 million passive ones on almost every conversion metric.

I have managed budgets large enough to run both models simultaneously, and the honest finding is that most brands do not need to choose between them. The question is which model serves which part of the funnel and what the right budget split is. Upper funnel brand-building through high-profile talent. Mid and lower funnel conversion through creator partnerships with tighter audience fit. The two approaches are complementary when the strategy is clear enough to deploy them that way.

BCG’s research on brand and go-to-market strategy makes a related point about how brand investment and commercial activation need to operate as a system rather than competing budget lines. The celebrity versus creator question is really a question about which part of that system you are investing in.

The Budget Question: What Does This Actually Cost

Celebrity talent fees are one of the least transparent cost items in marketing. Ranges are wide, influenced by exclusivity requirements, usage rights, territory, duration, and the specific deliverables required. A social post from a mid-tier celebrity costs a fraction of a broadcast campaign with full exclusivity. These are not comparable investments and should not be evaluated as if they are.

The talent fee is also rarely the largest cost. Production, media, agency fees, and the time cost of managing a complex partnership add significantly to the total. A realistic budget model for a celebrity campaign includes all of these, not just the headline talent number that tends to dominate internal discussions.

One thing I learned running agency P&Ls is that celebrity campaigns have a way of expanding beyond their original scope. The talent is expensive, so you want to maximise usage. Maximising usage requires more production. More production requires more time and budget. The original brief grows. The original budget does not. This is a predictable problem that is best addressed by fixing the scope tightly before any talent is confirmed, not after.

On the question of return, the honest answer is that it depends on what you are measuring and over what time horizon. Short-term sales attribution for celebrity brand campaigns is usually weak because that is not what they are designed to do. Longer-term brand equity measures, share of voice, and consideration metrics are more appropriate. The mistake is evaluating an upper-funnel investment on lower-funnel metrics and concluding it did not work.

Growth strategy thinking, including how to allocate across brand and activation, is something I cover across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy section of this site. The celebrity question does not sit in isolation from broader questions about how you build a brand that grows.

What Effie-Winning Work Tells Us About Celebrity Effectiveness

The Effie Awards are the closest thing marketing has to a rigorous effectiveness standard. Entries have to demonstrate a causal relationship between the campaign and a commercial outcome. You cannot win by showing reach numbers or brand awareness scores in isolation. You have to show that the work moved something that matters to the business.

Having judged entries across multiple categories, the pattern in celebrity work is consistent. The campaigns that make it through to the final stages are not the ones with the most famous talent. They are the ones where the celebrity relationship was built into the strategy from the beginning, where the creative gave the celebrity a specific and credible role, and where the brand had the patience to let the association build over time.

The campaigns that fall short at the effectiveness stage tend to share a different pattern. The celebrity was selected for fame or cultural moment rather than fit. The creative execution was generic enough that the celebrity could have been swapped out without changing the campaign’s meaning. The measurement approach relied on inputs like impressions and reach rather than outputs like consideration, trial, or sales.

This is not a small distinction. It is the difference between a campaign that builds something durable and one that generates a news cycle and then fades. Both cost money. Only one of them is an investment.

Semrush’s overview of growth tools touches on how brand measurement has evolved to capture longer-term effects alongside short-term signals, which is relevant to anyone trying to build an honest picture of what celebrity investment is delivering.

The Honest Limitations of Celebrity Advertising

Celebrity advertising cannot fix a product problem. It cannot substitute for distribution. It cannot close a price gap that is too wide for the target audience. And it cannot build long-term brand equity if the underlying brand positioning is unclear.

These limitations matter because celebrity campaigns are often proposed as solutions to problems they are not equipped to solve. The brand is losing market share: sign a celebrity. The product launch is not getting traction: sign a celebrity. The business needs a short-term sales boost: sign a celebrity. In each of these cases, the celebrity might help at the margin. But the underlying problem remains, and the budget spent on talent is budget not spent on addressing it.

The most commercially useful question to ask before any celebrity investment is: if the campaign is successful, what specifically will be different? If the answer is vague, the brief is not ready. If the answer is specific and the celebrity is genuinely the best mechanism to achieve it, the investment has a rational basis. That is the standard worth holding to.

BCG’s work on go-to-market launch strategy makes a point that applies well beyond pharmaceuticals: the most successful launches are built on a clear understanding of the commercial problem, with tactics chosen to address that problem specifically. Celebrity is a tactic. It needs a strategy to be useful.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions