The 2024 Summer Olympics are quickly approaching. While many of us are considering the over/under on whether Paris will be able to clean up the Seine in time for the marathon swimming events, Core Power, Fairlife play in the protein-shake category targeted to athletes and gym rats, is thinking about swimming from a different perspective. More specifically, they’re thinking about a swimmer, namely Katy Ledecky, the seven-time Olympic gold medalist. The brand recently signed Ledecky to a multi-year sponsorship deal. Their first ad campaign features the swimmer drinking a shake as part of her post-workout recovery routine.
Meanwhile, Powerade, part of the Coca-Cola empire, kicked off a major lead-up-to-the-Olympics campaign featuring Simone Biles, the crowned GOAT of elite gymnastics. (Interestingly, Biles was the face of Core Power’s last two summer Olympics campaigns.) The campaign is called ‘Pause is Power’, a nod to Biles’ departure from the 2021 Tokyo Olympics in order to take a mental-health break from competing.
This got us to thinking….do consumers believe that an athlete (or any famous person in an ad or social post) actually uses the product they’re promoting? Do consumers even care?
A 2023 study conducted by UPenn’s Wharton Neuroscience Initiative asked participants to look at fake ads of snack foods featuring either celebrities or non-celebrities. The researchers then tracked their eye movements and pupil dilation. They found that “people are more likely to choose products that are endorsed by a celebrity rather than a non-celebrity, and they make that choice faster. Viewers had less pupil dilation when choosing a product that was advertised with a celebrity, an indication that they were spending less time deliberating their choice and were more confident about their decision.”
Anecdotally (and much-less scientifically), our own research shows that people are willing to attach value to products that celebrities and influencers promote. If you remind someone who just bought a product due to an influencer’s endorsement that the influencer is being paid to shill the product, the response is typically a shrug. Since the influencer has built enough credibility and trust with the follower, the are willing to overlook the quid pro quo that they know is going on behind the scenes.
Back to Ledecky and Biles. Elite athletes have teams of physical therapists and nutritionists (and now even mentalists) orchestrating their every movement and every bite. It’s hard to imagine that Katy Ledecky has a cooler at the ready stocked with Core Power bottles for her to chug after a workout or that Simone Biles is reaching for a Powerade during a break between gravity-defining practice runs on the vault. But we think it’s a fair assumption that sales of these products will spike in response to their respective Olympics ad campaigns.
The rise of influencer marketing is proof that brands believe that celebrity endorsements work, regardless of whether their target consumer believes the star actually uses the product. And who knows, maybe some do – Michael Jordan’s famous partnership with Nike likely wouldn’t have happened unless he truly believed in their basketball sneakers. After all, he had to wear those Air Jordans at every game.