Google Testing Celebrity Endorsements in Paid Advertising

Anne Garcia - September 16, 2011

Paid search advertisements on Google may include celebrity endorsements in the near future. Google has just started testing an annotation under paid search results that include a celebrity endorsement along with a small image of the celebrity.

In the screen shot below, when the phrase “kardashian sears” was searched, a celebrity endorsement from Khloe Kardashian appeared underneath the paid search ad. In this example, Sears is telling Google that Khloe Kardashian has endorsed this product line that is available on the Sears website.

Google Product Manager, Christian Oestlien said that there are only a handful of advertisers in the current program and limited information is available. 

It will be very interesting to see how celebrity endorsements affect the performance of paid search advertising, especially with fourth quarter right around the corner and a big push for holiday sales. I would expect that paid search advertisements with endorsements from celebrities would garner more clicks than an advertisement without.  In addition, there are many advertisers that would benefit from this new feature, because there are so many celebrity-endorsed products and services.