Monday, 27 December 2010

Worth publishing in its entirety, Jakob Nielsen, in his latest Alertbox email:

Internet campaigns *without* a celebrity endorser got 86% more views than celebrity-driven campaigns, averaged across 450 major campaigns. Obvious conclusion: save the endorsement fees. (Spend a tiny fraction of it on user research instead, and you’ll double the conversion rate from whatever views you do get :-)

It’s interesting to consider *why* celebrities don’t work online, when they do work so well in old media.

The article linked above quotes Matt Cutler for saying (my paraphrase) that online campaigns work by engaging users and that this is more likely to happen in the absence of a major celebrity.

I’m reminded of the Cluetrain Manifesto and its distinction between traditional one-way *messaging* (where a company talks down to its customers) and the Web’s two-way dialog between company and customer.

A related explanation comes from Scott McCloud’s book “Understanding Comics”: comics connect broadly with readers because the abstracted characters look more universal than the specific individuals shown in photorealistic art. Similarly, users engage more online when they are not shown a specific person that they already know. The blanker canvas of a campaign without celebrities prompt more interaction, which is the name of the game on the Web. (Similarly, we know from eyetracking that users look more at “real people” than at glamour stock photos.)

An online campaign will work poorly if it’s all nicely wrapped-up as a one-way blast of messaging where the user can do nothing but sitting in stunned silence and admire the work of the agency and their hired celebrity.