Celebrity Endorsements: How Adly Helps Even Small Businesses Build Brand Connection With Celebrity Power

By Jonathan Keane

It’s important for your customers to be able to connect with your service or product, almost on a personal level. We tend to look for something to relate to in everything, something that speaks to us. In the areas of marketing, this cannot be understated. You are looking for a connection and in the age of instant communications, where some are often ephemeral, crafting a connection that you can harvest and make last for years to come is vital to your business surviving in the high speed digital age. So where do celebrities come into this?

Celebrities, regardless of their background, whether it’s an actor, musician, athlete or someone who’s famous just for being famous, brings a certain eminence with them and most importantly, a fan base.

Charities, for example, have leveraged this for many, many years with countless organizations pairing with a celebrity, or a slew of celebrities, to be the face of their cause and spread the word. It’s a model that isn’t new by any means but in the age of social media, and specifically Twitter, companies, big and small, are finding new ways to engage with consumers and celebrity endorsements are just one way of doing that.

Adly is an online marketing start-up that was founded in 2009, but in May of 2012, they grabbed a few headlines when they announced that former News Corp. executive and Photobucket general manager Walter Delph had been named the new CEO of the company.

“With the advent of social media consumers are able to connect with celebrities that they would not have otherwise had access to,” Walter explains on the very basic idea that inspired the beginning of Adly four years ago.

The small company, with a team of four, is a marketing firm that aims to “spark authentic conversations between celebrities and their fans”, all on the topic of your brand. By analyzing the conversations, Adly optimizes the results for more efficient targeting of your product/service to the right people in the right places. These two services of celebrity contacts and analytics form the foundation for Adly and it has been built from there.

“The power of celebrity has long been acknowledged as one of the most powerful ways to influence and connect with consumers. A brand’s ability to influence consumers via celebrity is considered one of the most effective ways to raise affinity and ultimately to drive purchase. Now with the power of data we can provide ROI metrics to brands,” says Walter on the power Adly and the information they can provide.

“For brands, the potential for celebrity influence is greater than ever, given how far a message can go thanks to social media and its ability to reach wide audiences,” he explains. “It’s apparent that a vast majority of consumers are using social media platforms to engage with celebrities and key influencers and this creates a space where brands can join in and benefit from the influence of a celebrity. Celebrities have the same reach as most in social television shows. The difference is that there is a two-way interaction between the consumer and the influencer.”

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Anthony Weiner Making Theatrical Debut in ‘Hating Breitbart’ Doc (Video)

The former congressman will be seen via news clips and the filmmakers are using his image to market their project.

As former congressman Anthony Weiner gears up for a possible run for mayor of New York, he is also making his theatrical debut in a film he probably wishes didn’t exist. Those involved with the movie, called Hating Breitbart, are also intending to lean on Weiner’s image — by way of news video of some of his embarrassing TV moments — to promote their film.

Weiner quit his congressional seat two years ago after he was caught tweeting lewd photos of himself to women he met on the Internet. His “sexting” turned into a major scandal in part because his wife, Huma Abedin, was at the time pregnant and an aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The entire episode, since dubbed “Weinergate,” is retold in the documentary film Hating Breitbart, which Freestyle Releasing will open in several theaters across the country on May 17, when it also becomes available on VOD.

Weiner did not participate in the making of the film but is seen via news clips, sometimes disparaging Andrew Breitbart, the new-media raconteur who exposed the then-congressman’s sexual foibles. The film is about Breitbart’s rise to prominence as a harsh critic of the mainstream media and as a favorite at Tea Party and other conservative gatherings.

Even though Weiner’s appearances are relatively few, the folks behind the film intend on making Weiner a large part of their marketing campaign, beginning with a video that will be released on the Internet, though The Hollywood Reporter has an advanced copy which is embedded below.

The 3-minute video is a timeline of the fiasco that began when Weiner denied tweeting pornographic photos of himself and insinuated his Twitter account had been hacked by Breitbart. Clips from numerous TV segments where experts attack Breitbart and defend Weiner are played over circus music. Besides multiple shots of Weiner, Wolf Blitzer, Chris Matthews and other news personalities are featured.

“CNN puts this Breitbart guy on and says the most outlandish things about complete, innocent people,” Weiner complains in the video. After Weiner calls a reporter a “jackass” for inquiring about his tweets, Breitbart is seen celebrating the exchange as the moment the media “got it.”

But Weiner’s primary miscalculation in the whole mess, Breitbart argues in the movie, was when he tweeted that his Facebook page and TiVo had been hacked, which, in retrospect, seems like Weiner’s hastily conceived plan to explain away a mistaken tweet that he sent to thousands instead of just the one intended recipient. By tweeting he was hacked — and the fateful tweet remained on his old Twitter account on Tuesday — he made accusations of a federal crime on one hand though on the other hand he was oddly disinterested in allowing an investigation.

The video ends with Weiner at a press conference where he comes clean about the tweets more than a week after Breitbart — who died a year ago — broke the story.  “To be clear, the picture was of me, and I sent it,” Weiner says.

Weiner, contacted by email, had no comment on the film or its marketing plans.

Read the story in The Hollywood Reporter