Article | Swordsman doc
When brands are looking for handsome men and beautiful women to endorse, a few days ago, Xu Zhisheng's "reverse endorsement" Semir advertisement quickly became popular and frequently appeared on Weibo and Douyin hot searches. In the advertisement, Xu Zhisheng transforms into a down feather and introduces the functions of the brand. He has a unique sense of ugliness that makes people laugh.
The last celebrity endorsement incident that sparked heated discussions was that of Yang Li and JD.com not long ago. The two are positive and negative, highlighting the popularity and helplessness of the celebrity endorsement market.
I talked about this with a friend who works in entertainment marketing. The other party judged that this might be a short-term endorsement for Xu Zhisheng and Semir. He mentioned a phenomenon: now has more and more brands asking celebrities for short-term endorsements.
I saw a piece of data released by Ye Eun, which also confirms this observation:
On the one hand, the celebrity endorsement market is quite hot this year. In the first half of 2024, the average number of brands endorsed by celebrities increased by 10.4% year-on-year and 61.9% over the same period in 2022. In addition, the average number of brand spokespersons increased by 20% year-on-year.
On the other hand, from 2021 to 2024, the number of short-term endorsements has shown a significant growth trend. In the first half of 2024, the number of short-term endorsements by celebrities has significantly exceeded previous years.
01 Short-term endorsement vs long-term endorsement
Celebrity endorsement has always been a brand strategic issue, which requires corporate leaders or the top management of the brand to make decisions, and the decision-making cycle is long. Therefore, brands and spokespersons have a long-term relationship. The contracts they sign are based on years, and many of them have been cooperating for several years.
For example, Wang Leehom endorsed Wahaha for 20 years (1998-2017), Yi Yang Qianxi endorsed Tmall in 2018, and it has been more than 6 years now.
As far as I know, the brand endorsement with the longest cooperation may be the cooperation between Nicholas Tse and Xtep. Up to now, the endorsement relationship between the two parties has lasted for 22 years.
Usually some big brands will often use the method of celebrity promotion, and the partners are usually very popular and powerful stars. Among them, traffic is not the only reference indicator for big brands to choose spokespersons. Factors considered include word-of-mouth, fan portraits, representative works, and national recognition. For example, Jay Chou , although his traffic indicators have been declining, his commercial influence has always been at a high level.
Because if you search for Jay Chou on Baidu Index, you will find that the most relevant things to his name are his professional activities, such as "singing", "concert", "song", "new song", etc. And if we search for certain traffic stars, we will find that the most relevant words are scandals.
long-term endorsements usually have a contract period of 1-3 years. The rights given to celebrities are generally "four ones": a TVC, a set of print ads, an offline event, a Weibo or Douyin release, and It’s the so-called “Four Ones” workload. Specific cooperation rights and fees will be increased or decreased according to the specific needs of the brand. Generally speaking, the annual cooperation fee for first-line stars is 8-15 million. For example, according to the Yangtze Business Daily, Yang Ying’s fee for endorsement of Marubi is 24 million for three years.
The biggest advantage of long-term endorsement is that the brand can establish a long-term and stable cooperative relationship with the spokesperson, so that its image, brand concept and values can be continuously conveyed, thereby establishing a professional and reliable image in the minds of consumers.
is different from the long generation of celebrities. The short generation model emerged in the era of social media. It often takes 3 months as a period, and even 1-2 months. Judging from the budget, the short-term promotion of a brand is usually only around 1 million, so first-line superstars generally do not accept short-term endorsements. Most of them are second- and third-tier stars, or stars who suddenly became popular due to a drama or a variety show will do short-term endorsements. .
There are four reasons for the popularity of short-term endorsements:
, The tightening of brand budgets is the most direct reason, so I won’t go into details here.. Consideration of public opinion risks.
This risk is reflected in both celebrities and brands.
First, in recent years, there have been more and more celebrity house collapses, and the safety risks of brand endorsements have become higher. Short-term endorsements are more flexible, which can minimize this risk and protect the brand image. In the past, Prada’s brand spokespersons were basically traffic stars. After experiencing the collapse of many brand spokespersons such as Zheng Shuang, Li Yifeng, Cai Xukun, etc., it changed its spokesperson strategy and turned to people like Jia Ling. A star with nationality and recognition.
The second is at the enterprise level. There are more and more thunder incidents involving related brands. In the past few years, p2p platform endorsements have involved many celebrities, and supervision at the national level has been further strengthened. As a result, many celebrities have adopted the concept of "safety first" when it comes to endorsements, and have become cautious when choosing brand cooperation. This also makes some celebrities willing to cooperate with each other on a short-term basis to reduce corporate risks that implicate themselves.
2 Celebrity short generation is a traffic-based method
According to my observation, brands have different marketing goals when inviting celebrities to endorse, which can be roughly divided into three types: buying image, buying endorsement, and buying traffic. Therefore, celebrity endorsement also has three levels of value. Let me briefly talk about it below.
The first category, symbolic value.
From a consumer perspective, in order to prove their class and establish their own unique identity recognition system, people often use certain symbol consumption to show their identification with a certain circle culture. The purpose of consumers' shopping is not only to obtain the use value of the goods, but also to pay more attention to the symbolic value represented by the goods. The higher the symbol level they possess by default, the stronger their spending power, and the higher their class level.
Therefore, brands require celebrities to be matched and equal in influence and tone. These brands or category products with symbolic attributes, like celebrities, represent a symbol.
Generally speaking, brands with certain social attributes or symbolic meanings, such as luxury goods and cars, attach great importance to the matching between their own brand and the image characteristics of celebrities, and they will want to obtain the symbolic value of celebrities.
Just like Jia Ling’s endorsement of Prada, it is definitely not because of her appearance, but because Jia Ling’s successful weight loss has formed an inspirational symbol, and this symbol is consistent with the temperament required by Prada. In order to ensure the brand tone, luxury goods need to constantly replenish their energy and energy.
The second category is trust endorsement.
People usually assume that if a person is famous in society, it means he has more social capital. In order to protect his reputation, he will often maintain a good reputation.
Under this understanding, credibility has become another important asset for celebrities to monetize through endorsements.
I have personally come into contact with a case: a catering company found a star who had attended the Spring Festival Gala as an endorsement, and the price was twice the market price. There was no special customized shooting between the star and the product, only portrait authorization was provided. As a result, the company used the celebrity advertisement to attract investment and franchise, and finally ran away. In fact, examples like
are constantly happening, especially in the fields of investment promotion, health care products, and financial services. These industries themselves need the endorsement of credible figures to enhance users’ trust.
Endorsement-type endorsements are an area of key supervision. The state has also issued policies and regulations to further clarify the responsibilities of celebrities for advertising endorsements and put forward specific requirements for companies to use celebrities to carry out advertising activities.
The third category is traffic import.
In my opinion, celebrity short generation is essentially a traffic-based marketing method.
Some brands with strong sales seasonality often only carry out marketing offensives during peak seasons. At this time, the celebrity short-term method can maximize the benefits of celebrities, and at the same time avoid signing long-term spokespersons with high endorsement fees, but only one year. Embarrassing and wasteful to only use once.
Brands such as Jindian, Louis Vuitton, Coca-Cola and other brands have won the favor of Sister Lang fans by cooperating with Wang Xinling in "Sister Lang 3" and through short-term promotion identities such as "Star Promotion Officer" and "Recommendation Officer". The gameplay of
requires brands to release the maximum potential of star traffic in a limited time. Therefore, the content, creativity, and interactive gameplay of celebrity short generations need to be constantly iteratively updated to comprehensively "entertain and cultivate" users.
In short-term endorsements, some brands not only focus on acquiring traffic, but also focus on converting traffic into actual sales. By deploying the conversion portal of the e-commerce platform, they allow brands to realize the link from "planting grass" to "pulling grass" and drive sales growth.
Based on the above different brand needs, the short-generation cooperation form has been greatly expanded.
With the rise of short videos and live broadcasts, in addition to traditional forms such as TVCs, print ads, attending events, and posting on Weibo, there are more options for cooperation models between brands and celebrities. The most common ones are three: creative interpolation , flipping videos, and live slicing.
Creative inserts integrate the characters and stars in the drama to perform sitcoms, maintaining the original flavor of the IP and coexisting with the drama. This form of advertising weakens the audience's aversion and resistance to advertising, and improves the audience's acceptance of brand information.
, live slicing authorization to meet the needs of enterprises for carrying goods. The slicing of
live broadcast sales is for celebrities to cut and edit their own live broadcast videos into short videos, and then attach product links to promote sales, or even embed them in the live broadcast room for secondary sales. A typical example is the video of actor Zhu Zixiao eating chicken feet. The video was cut out and embedded in major selling live broadcast rooms, creating the "illusion" of eating chicken feet for 15 hours. It triggered a lot of discussions and also drove a lot of sales. .
This situation of "quickly planting and quickly harvesting " is more utilitarian. Brands often do not plan ahead, but follow hot spots to invest. When a star wins a certain show, or a character in a certain drama or movie becomes popular, we should cooperate quickly and reap a wave of traffic.
However, this method will lead to frequent changes in spokespersons, which can easily cause the brand's imprint on consumers to be blurred, and even lead to a significant reduction in brand value.
Therefore, my suggestion is that if a brand is suitable for short-term promotion, don’t blindly pursue popular celebrities. It is still necessary to first clarify the tone of the brand, combine your long-term and short-term marketing goals, create a "long-term" celebrity short-term matrix, and find a group of celebrities with high matching, so that every celebrity short-term becomes a continuation of the brand value. and overlay.
In a certain sense, the popularity of Xu Zhisheng’s reverse endorsement has once again confirmed the feasibility of short generation. In the era of short videos, brands are driven by traffic, coupled with the transformation of corporate marketing growth methods from brand-driven to product-effect synergy. In the future, the short-term star generation method will become more and more popular, and the gameplay will become more and more diverse. Both brands and celebrities need to be prepared.
Article | Swordsman doc
When brands are looking for handsome men and beautiful women to endorse, a few days ago, Xu Zhisheng's "reverse endorsement" Semir advertisement quickly became popular and frequently appeared on Weibo and Douyin hot searches. In the advertisement, Xu Zhisheng transforms into a down feather and introduces the functions of the brand. He has a unique sense of ugliness that makes people laugh.
The last celebrity endorsement incident that sparked heated discussions was that of Yang Li and JD.com not long ago. The two are positive and negative, highlighting the popularity and helplessness of the celebrity endorsement market.
I talked about this with a friend who works in entertainment marketing. The other party judged that this might be a short-term endorsement for Xu Zhisheng and Semir. He mentioned a phenomenon: now has more and more brands asking celebrities for short-term endorsements.
I saw a piece of data released by Ye Eun, which also confirms this observation:
On the one hand, the celebrity endorsement market is quite hot this year. In the first half of 2024, the average number of brands endorsed by celebrities increased by 10.4% year-on-year and 61.9% over the same period in 2022. In addition, the average number of brand spokespersons increased by 20% year-on-year.
On the other hand, from 2021 to 2024, the number of short-term endorsements has shown a significant growth trend. In the first half of 2024, the number of short-term endorsements by celebrities has significantly exceeded previous years.
01 Short-term endorsement vs long-term endorsement
Celebrity endorsement has always been a brand strategic issue, which requires corporate leaders or the top management of the brand to make decisions, and the decision-making cycle is long. Therefore, brands and spokespersons have a long-term relationship. The contracts they sign are based on years, and many of them have been cooperating for several years.
For example, Wang Leehom endorsed Wahaha for 20 years (1998-2017), Yi Yang Qianxi endorsed Tmall in 2018, and it has been more than 6 years now.
As far as I know, the brand endorsement with the longest cooperation may be the cooperation between Nicholas Tse and Xtep. Up to now, the endorsement relationship between the two parties has lasted for 22 years.
Usually some big brands will often use the method of celebrity promotion, and the partners are usually very popular and powerful stars. Among them, traffic is not the only reference indicator for big brands to choose spokespersons. Factors considered include word-of-mouth, fan portraits, representative works, and national recognition. For example, Jay Chou , although his traffic indicators have been declining, his commercial influence has always been at a high level.
Because if you search for Jay Chou on Baidu Index, you will find that the most relevant things to his name are his professional activities, such as "singing", "concert", "song", "new song", etc. And if we search for certain traffic stars, we will find that the most relevant words are scandals.
long-term endorsements usually have a contract period of 1-3 years. The rights given to celebrities are generally "four ones": a TVC, a set of print ads, an offline event, a Weibo or Douyin release, and It’s the so-called “Four Ones” workload. Specific cooperation rights and fees will be increased or decreased according to the specific needs of the brand. Generally speaking, the annual cooperation fee for first-line stars is 8-15 million. For example, according to the Yangtze Business Daily, Yang Ying’s fee for endorsement of Marubi is 24 million for three years.
The biggest advantage of long-term endorsement is that the brand can establish a long-term and stable cooperative relationship with the spokesperson, so that its image, brand concept and values can be continuously conveyed, thereby establishing a professional and reliable image in the minds of consumers.
is different from the long generation of celebrities. The short generation model emerged in the era of social media. It often takes 3 months as a period, and even 1-2 months. Judging from the budget, the short-term promotion of a brand is usually only around 1 million, so first-line superstars generally do not accept short-term endorsements. Most of them are second- and third-tier stars, or stars who suddenly became popular due to a drama or a variety show will do short-term endorsements. .
There are four reasons for the popularity of short-term endorsements:
, The tightening of brand budgets is the most direct reason, so I won’t go into details here.. Consideration of public opinion risks.
This risk is reflected in both celebrities and brands.
First, in recent years, there have been more and more celebrity house collapses, and the safety risks of brand endorsements have become higher. Short-term endorsements are more flexible, which can minimize this risk and protect the brand image. In the past, Prada’s brand spokespersons were basically traffic stars. After experiencing the collapse of many brand spokespersons such as Zheng Shuang, Li Yifeng, Cai Xukun, etc., it changed its spokesperson strategy and turned to people like Jia Ling. A star with nationality and recognition.
The second is at the enterprise level. There are more and more thunder incidents involving related brands. In the past few years, p2p platform endorsements have involved many celebrities, and supervision at the national level has been further strengthened. As a result, many celebrities have adopted the concept of "safety first" when it comes to endorsements, and have become cautious when choosing brand cooperation. This also makes some celebrities willing to cooperate with each other on a short-term basis to reduce corporate risks that implicate themselves.
2 Celebrity short generation is a traffic-based method
According to my observation, brands have different marketing goals when inviting celebrities to endorse, which can be roughly divided into three types: buying image, buying endorsement, and buying traffic. Therefore, celebrity endorsement also has three levels of value. Let me briefly talk about it below.
The first category, symbolic value.
From a consumer perspective, in order to prove their class and establish their own unique identity recognition system, people often use certain symbol consumption to show their identification with a certain circle culture. The purpose of consumers' shopping is not only to obtain the use value of the goods, but also to pay more attention to the symbolic value represented by the goods. The higher the symbol level they possess by default, the stronger their spending power, and the higher their class level.
Therefore, brands require celebrities to be matched and equal in influence and tone. These brands or category products with symbolic attributes, like celebrities, represent a symbol.
Generally speaking, brands with certain social attributes or symbolic meanings, such as luxury goods and cars, attach great importance to the matching between their own brand and the image characteristics of celebrities, and they will want to obtain the symbolic value of celebrities.
Just like Jia Ling’s endorsement of Prada, it is definitely not because of her appearance, but because Jia Ling’s successful weight loss has formed an inspirational symbol, and this symbol is consistent with the temperament required by Prada. In order to ensure the brand tone, luxury goods need to constantly replenish their energy and energy.
The second category is trust endorsement.
People usually assume that if a person is famous in society, it means he has more social capital. In order to protect his reputation, he will often maintain a good reputation.
Under this understanding, credibility has become another important asset for celebrities to monetize through endorsements.
I have personally come into contact with a case: a catering company found a star who had attended the Spring Festival Gala as an endorsement, and the price was twice the market price. There was no special customized shooting between the star and the product, only portrait authorization was provided. As a result, the company used the celebrity advertisement to attract investment and franchise, and finally ran away. In fact, examples like
are constantly happening, especially in the fields of investment promotion, health care products, and financial services. These industries themselves need the endorsement of credible figures to enhance users’ trust.
Endorsement-type endorsements are an area of key supervision. The state has also issued policies and regulations to further clarify the responsibilities of celebrities for advertising endorsements and put forward specific requirements for companies to use celebrities to carry out advertising activities.
The third category is traffic import.
In my opinion, celebrity short generation is essentially a traffic-based marketing method.
Some brands with strong sales seasonality often only carry out marketing offensives during peak seasons. At this time, the celebrity short-term method can maximize the benefits of celebrities, and at the same time avoid signing long-term spokespersons with high endorsement fees, but only one year. Embarrassing and wasteful to only use once.
Brands such as Jindian, Louis Vuitton, Coca-Cola and other brands have won the favor of Sister Lang fans by cooperating with Wang Xinling in "Sister Lang 3" and through short-term promotion identities such as "Star Promotion Officer" and "Recommendation Officer". The gameplay of
requires brands to release the maximum potential of star traffic in a limited time. Therefore, the content, creativity, and interactive gameplay of celebrity short generations need to be constantly iteratively updated to comprehensively "entertain and cultivate" users.
In short-term endorsements, some brands not only focus on acquiring traffic, but also focus on converting traffic into actual sales. By deploying the conversion portal of the e-commerce platform, they allow brands to realize the link from "planting grass" to "pulling grass" and drive sales growth.
Based on the above different brand needs, the short-generation cooperation form has been greatly expanded.
With the rise of short videos and live broadcasts, in addition to traditional forms such as TVCs, print ads, attending events, and posting on Weibo, there are more options for cooperation models between brands and celebrities. The most common ones are three: creative interpolation , flipping videos, and live slicing.
Creative inserts integrate the characters and stars in the drama to perform sitcoms, maintaining the original flavor of the IP and coexisting with the drama. This form of advertising weakens the audience's aversion and resistance to advertising, and improves the audience's acceptance of brand information.
, live slicing authorization to meet the needs of enterprises for carrying goods. The slicing of
live broadcast sales is for celebrities to cut and edit their own live broadcast videos into short videos, and then attach product links to promote sales, or even embed them in the live broadcast room for secondary sales. A typical example is the video of actor Zhu Zixiao eating chicken feet. The video was cut out and embedded in major selling live broadcast rooms, creating the "illusion" of eating chicken feet for 15 hours. It triggered a lot of discussions and also drove a lot of sales. .
This situation of "quickly planting and quickly harvesting " is more utilitarian. Brands often do not plan ahead, but follow hot spots to invest. When a star wins a certain show, or a character in a certain drama or movie becomes popular, we should cooperate quickly and reap a wave of traffic.
However, this method will lead to frequent changes in spokespersons, which can easily cause the brand's imprint on consumers to be blurred, and even lead to a significant reduction in brand value.
Therefore, my suggestion is that if a brand is suitable for short-term promotion, don’t blindly pursue popular celebrities. It is still necessary to first clarify the tone of the brand, combine your long-term and short-term marketing goals, create a "long-term" celebrity short-term matrix, and find a group of celebrities with high matching, so that every celebrity short-term becomes a continuation of the brand value. and overlay.
In a certain sense, the popularity of Xu Zhisheng’s reverse endorsement has once again confirmed the feasibility of short generation. In the era of short videos, brands are driven by traffic, coupled with the transformation of corporate marketing growth methods from brand-driven to product-effect synergy. In the future, the short-term star generation method will become more and more popular, and the gameplay will become more and more diverse. Both brands and celebrities need to be prepared.
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