Influencelebs: gold mine & minefield. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí       LMMIAMI.COM

• What will happen to the Subway brand in the midst of the Jared Fogle scandal?
• Hard to know.
• Let’s see some precedents.
• A few years back the BBC experienced a shock quite similar to the Subway meltdown.
• After Jimmy Savile died in 2011 (Savile had been a high profile personality with a long trajectory as a talk show host for the station) a long list of accusations came to the surface.
• Looks like Savile had been a notorious sexual predator and abuser with a penchant for preying on underage victims.
• On the BBC’s premises!
• Not only that, a number of higher ups in the ranks of the British Broacasting Service who had reason to believe, if not evidence, that this was true not only failed to take action: they orchestrated a massive cover-up.
• As you can imagine, heads rolled.
• Yet the BBC’s reputation was, for the most part, salvaged.  
• No need to look overseas: on a smaller scale but with surprising frequency, Nike has an episode of this nature pretty much every year.
• Drugs, bribes, animal cruelty.
• Lance Armstrong, Michael Vick, FIFA, Marion Jones, the list is long.
• The brand seems to survive.
• Procter & Gamble?
• They might be doing their homework and background checks right: they use tons of celebs to pitch their products and rarely have a scandal.
• On a parallel world, Hollywood might be a good test tube for these types of occurrences too.
• Exhibit 1: Robert Downey Jr
• He was both a remarkable actor and the ultimate Hollywood failure story.
• A trainwreck.
• Unemployable.
• A heavy substance abuser since childhood, a total mess, highly dangerous to himself and to those around him.
• He made it alive past the age of 27 out of sheer luck.
• He’s now clean and the highest paid actor in Hollywood for the third year in a row.
• When Tom Cruise “jumped the couch” the box office of his movies took a hit.
• Rumor has it that he had been behaving erratically, both privately and publicly, for a while and his brand became radioactive in Hollywood.
• Now he’s back with a vengeance, his Mission Impossible franchise raking in the big bucks in its fifth installment.
• Of course, some folks will never have a second act.
• Two words: Bill Cosby.
• In short: dealing with flesh & bone celebs can be a minefield.
• Nevertheless, in my humble opinion, brands need to bite the bullet, cross their fingers and keep relying on influencers (formerly known as celebs) for their marketing purposes.
• In a not so distant past, the conventional wisdom in our racket was mostly stacked against the use of celebs: they’ll steal the limelight, eclipse your brand and cannibalize your product.
• If you need a celeb to pitch the benefits of your product then the strategic & creative premise was flimsy, weak and possibly wrong in the first place.
• People will watch your commercial, remember the endorser and ignore the endorsee.
• The “idea” is king.
• Or queen, to be gender neutral.
• Endorsers and spokespersons are a waste of time and money.
• Working with celebs is a pain in the rear end.
• Annoying divas and prima donnas.
• Their contracts come with riders that read like an unabridged edition of the Old Testament.
• Well.
• That was then.
• The tide has turned.
• Two words: social media.
• These days the SocMed feeds of a credible influencer like, say, JayZ are a one-person media conglomerate.
• You could easily launch a new brand of sneakers just by landing a deal with JayZ’s camp.
• He tweets about your sneakers, he casually rocks them on Instagram, he plugs them on his music videos.
• You are good to go.
• Add to the equation the myriad digital-native niche celebs (sorry, influencers) who pop up on YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat and Periscope everyday.
• Unknown folks who, pretty much overnight, garner a SocMed fan base of millions of attentive eyeballs.
• Comedians male, female and otherwise delivering goofy stand-up routines from their bedrooms.
• Impersonators of all shapes and sizes.
• Self-taught CGI artists, cartoon artists and animators creating homemade content with vast followings and zero knowledge of copyright law.
• Karaoke artists & cover bands.
• Cat video auteurs.
• For instance: have you ever heard of comedy duo Smosh?
• Anthony Padilla & Ian Hecox, two SoCal kids born in 1987.
• They have 21 million subscribers on YouTube.
• Jenna Marbles?
• 15 million subscribers.
• The list is endless.
• This new phenomenon opens up a whole new, inevitable playing field for brands.
• A huge opportunity.
• Then again, can you run a background check on all of them?
• Can you tap their phones?
• No need to go that far: JayZ makes no secret about the fact that he was a drug dealer when he was a teenager in the Brooklyn projects.
• Is he totally clean?
• What if his past comes back to haunt him and the brands he endorses?
• In any case, our culture –our marketing & advertising racket in particular- is chockfull of groupies and rubbernecks.
• Celebs will always radiate that certain, irresistible pixie dust.
• We simply can’t get enough of their incessant mostly manufactured “real life” quotidian antics, professional or otherwise, on and off camera.
• Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.
• We just need to be fully aware that we are venturing into treacherous terrain when we entrust are hard-earned brand equity to them.