Brands chase celebrity endorsement through gifts

(10 Jan 2014) For brand public relations all that glitters at the Golden Globes is the golden publicity offered by getting a celebrity to seemingly endorse your product.
The glamour of Hollywood is priceless and marketing teams go to great lengths to persuade celebrities to use their products.
This is the reasoning behind gifting suites.
The biggest and most prestigious suite during Golden Globe week is the HBO� Luxury Lounge at the Four Seasons at Beverly Hills where HBO talent is invited in addition to all Globes nominees.
This gifting lounge is one of the most exclusive because only invited guests are allowed. No assistants. No family. No handlers.
If you are not a known star – you are not in that room.
But does getting a photo of a celebrity using a product “really” pay off for the companies who participate in these suites anymore ?
There is no such thing as free publicity, each company pays for their gifting table.
For the HBO suite – the price is $10,000 dollars USD per table for each of the 11 sponsors this year.
The cost is seven times that to be the sole lead sponsor, which this year is PANDORA jewellery.
Margaret Nam of PANDORA jewellery explains the logic.
“Well it’s all about brand visibility. Celebrities nowadays have a huge global presence. We actually just sponsored an event with Jennifer Aniston in Toronto and we generated millions of impressions from that so it’s a huge return on investment for us. Whenever people saw Jennifer Aniston in front of our PANDORA logo they darted going into shops, picking up some of our pieces and it just grew our brand.”
The eleven companies participating in the HBO suite are giving each celebrity a total of close to $4,000 USD worth of goods this year.
Howard Bragman is Vice Chairman, Reputation.com < and Chairman of Fifteen Minutes Public Relations, one of the countries top nationally recognised PR branding experts, television pundit and spin doctor.
He says if a significant celebrity is photographed using the brand, in an authentic way, and it gets into the media, it is very valuable for the brand.
“A gifting suite is a wonderful thing but you have to understand it’s got to be part of an overall marketing program. What I mean by that is you can’t just give a pair of shoes to a celebrity and have them wear them and go ‘hee ha! so and so is wearing my shoes!’ There’s an implicit understanding that when a celebrity goes to a gifting suite that they agree to be photographed in the product so the company has to put it on social media, put it in their newsletters and hopefully get it to traditional media if they can.”
When gifting suites began years ago, there was a mystique but today most suites are watered down with lesser celebrities and lesser products and those products usually end up in the hands of assistants or friends of celebrities.
Even lifestyle, beauty and food products can benefit, as once they have been given to a celebrity then their publicist can name that well known face as a fan.
But for most brands the photo is the ultimate goal as Art Abenoza, CEO of ImPRessLA, a fashion and shoe PR agency explains.
“It can relate to sales which is the overall goal for PR. I do both PR and sales so I see the other end of it of how it can translate to a lot of sales. A lot of retailers like big department stores like Nordstrom’s and little boutiques. They ask for press. Who’s wearing it. Who has it? Who’s used it? Those pictures alone get you into the door for those stores so it does help a lot.”