Celebrity Advertising

This paper reviews the current boom in celebrity advertising. More specifically, the objectives of this paper are fivefold: (1)to provide a historical overview of celebrities in advertising, and to discuss at least four types of celebrity advertisements; (2) to highlight the advantages and hazards of using celebrities in advertising; (3) to outline the FTC guidelines and other developments in the field; (4) to pinpoint the major attributes to look for in selecting celebrities; and (5) to review briefly the empirical research findings on the topic. The author concludes that communication research on celebrity advertising seems to be rather contradictory. On the one hand, there is a strong consensus that the number of celebrity ads has increased significantly over the past few years. On the other hand, research findings seem to indicate that celebrity endorsers are not as effective in the 1980s as they were in preceding years.