What can Celebrity Endorsement Do for Your Brand?

Using celebrities to endorse and add credibility to gaming brands is becoming increasingly popular among major operators. Sportsbook.com has Brooke Burke, Paradise Poker has Caprice, 32 Red has Patsy Kensit and the list goes on. Tagging a credible and recognised personality to a gaming site instantly creates an image of “bigness” and allows users to create lifestyle, personal and aspiration associations with the celebrity used. This not only increases a person’s likeliness to join the gaming site, but can also increase the lifetime of the customer.

Increasing customer lifetime by using a celebrity requires a managed roll-out of new uses for your celebrity personality. Occasional emails from the personality, visits by the personality to the chat room or tables, and the incorporation of the celebrity image into different locations on the site, should produce the desired results if you have chosen the right representative for your site.

Brian Balsbaugh, owner of poker talent agency Poker Royalty explains. “Many poker sites have been successful using top professionals by having them provide content for the site. This gives customers a reason to revisit the site to get updates and instructional information from the top names in poker. That’s done through trip reports and ‘Hand of the Week’ kind of articles, as well as offering the ability to interact with the players themselves.”

According to Balsbaugh, “The message that a site is sending about its services and product in general is important. Coming up with players that fit the identity of that message is imperative.”

For example, if you want people to perceive your brand as reliable then someone like Michael Jordan may provide the right endorsement; if you want to have people to believe you have the most fun and exciting brand on the net, a celebrity like Dennis Rodman may be a better fit.

Poker rooms commonly use celebrity poker players to get their brand association broadcast on the television, but the sponsorship of a poker pro does more than provide the brand with a personality.

“Another aspect is exposure. Celebrities can bring in new players to the site. Like many of the dotcoms of the late nineties, they’re driven by the need for brand awareness and brand exposure. They need to come up with as many creative ways as possible to make sure that their potential customer base is aware of their products and services, and the one way they can do that is to align themselves with a professional player or celebrity who will wear their logo on televised tournaments to get them exposure on TV, making their logo visible to the mass market,” says Balsbaugh.

Beyond the promotion and credibility brought on by celebrity endorsement, online gaming sites can leverage celebrities to provide testimony to the quality of the product.

“Take a broad view and look at why companies use celebrity endorsements. You can look at golf, basketball, football, other sports and entertainment properties. Let’s take basketball and tennis shoes as an example. Firstly, it provides credibility from a performance and quality perspective: ‘If that pair of Basketball shoes is good enough for Michael Jordan, it’s good enough for me.’ By the same token, I believe that translates into the online gaming world so that, when you’re spending your money through a Neteller account with an overseas country, you want to believe that that company is credible and that your money is not just going to evaporate. So what the companies are doing is having a face associated with the brand – if Howard Lederer or Phil Hellmuth are associated, and they’re quality people, it must be a quality product. So credibility is an important aspect.”

Celebrity endorsement does not guarantee success. Porn starlet Jenna Jameson had her own-branded casino, and it barely got off the ground. Rodney Dangerfield, Dennis Rodman and Kenny Rogers had theirs too, and each met a similar fate. The important thing to remember is that a celebrity spokesperson is part of the marketing mix, not the lynchpin.

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