The idea of using celebrities as a means to promote a product isn’t anything new. Remember the Wheaties box? Thirty years ago, getting on the Wheaties box was the pinnacle of celebrity endorsements. I still remember sitting at the kitchen table when I was eight or nine years old, eating my cereal and staring at a cardboard box with Michael Jordan’s picture staring back at me. Later, when I was a teenager, the celebrity “Got Milk” ads became my favorite part of flipping through any teen magazine. Do you remember the Backstreet Boys milk ad? I do, and so do thousands of other digital natives. From TV, to radio, to print, celebrities ruled the marketing world.
But now, with the rise of social media, celebrities don’t even need a photo shoot or TV commercial to become a company’s new spokesperson. All they need is an Instagram (or YouTube) account, free product samples, and a dab of creativity. If you don’t have the money to launch a big advertising initiative, it’s no problem. For companies that are looking to reach a certain user base, there are plenty of famous Instagrammers out there who will tweet a picture and an endorsement for a few bucks. They get to build their brand name and you get to dip a toe into the world of celebrity spokespeople. Not a bad deal, right?
In the last couple of months, though, it’s become clear that not all celebrities are savvy advertisers. While sometimes the product pushes are innocuous enough, recently one “celebrity” posted a poorly vetted endorsement that caused quite a bit of fall out. A few weeks back, a pregnant Kim Kardashian posted an Instagram photo of herself and a bottle of prescription morning sickness pills from Duchesnay USA. She raved about the drug and urged her followers to talk to their doctors about using it. The problem was she failed to mention the half-dozen side effects of the pills-a faux pas that wasn’t only misleading, but against the law. Thankfully, the Food and Drug Administration took notice and demanded she remove the post.
While Kardashian removed the post quickly, her actions initiated a hot debate across the web, leading many to wonder who should be responsible for monitoring product endorsements on social media sites. Should the FDA be scrolling through hundreds of thousands of posts looking for offenders, or should the social media site itself be responsible for censoring such content?
Read more: Virtual Wheaties Box: The New Era of Social Media Marketing
