Celebs in ads

Celebrities making a fast buck in adland has turned cool.

Exerpt from the article: There was a time when only two categories of celebrity got into advertising. There were those, such as Liz Hurley and Joan Collins, who despite their best efforts to make it as movie or pop stars, weren’t really much good at anything other than being famous. But fame, once acquired, is an asset in itself, and advertisers have always paid up to exploit it.

And then there were celebrities on the way down, once credible as artists and performers but now reduced to trading off past glories.

That’s okay, because everybody needs to make a living, though there has always been something a little sad about the spectacle of a once noble thespian or formerly fab supermodel reduced to being the frontperson for teabags or Bovril.

Or there used to be, in the days when artists and performers who wanted to retain a shred of aesthetic credibility wouldn’t be caught dead in anything so naff as an ad.

In those days, if artists of the stature of David Bowie wanted to earn a little bit extra on the side they went to Japan, where the same rules didn’t apply. There the Thin White Duke, marketed over here as the epitome of arty inaccessible cool, could appear in adverts for sake and get away with it.