When advertisers want to associate their products with aspirational reference groups, they usually resort to celebrity advertising. And that’s what Amazon did for this year’s Super Bowl ad for one of its main products: Alexa.
In the 90 second ad, we see Amazon’s personal assistant suddenly losing her voice. The happening quickly becomes news and the Amazon’s team tries to find a solution. That’s when we meet the first known face of the spot: Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, who has become quite a celebrity himself over the past years.
The ad goes on and we see many celebrities doing Alexa’s job: TV chef Gordon Ramsey, rapper and singer Cardi B, actress and writer Rebel Wilson, and Sir Anthony Hopkins, who needs no introduction. In a humorous way, they are all trying to help Alexa’s users in their day to day activities.
When Amazon decides to use celebrities in their ad, they are aiming for people to relate wand pattern their behavior after them. It’s the use of an aspirational reference group, a group influence that the target audience would like to belong.
Amazon spent an estimated $15 million dollars just to buy the 90 seconds slot during Sunday’s Super Bowl, that added to the cost of the video production, plus the celebrities’ cache, it’s quite a considerable amount.
But in a pre-release version of the commercial launched two days before the Super Bowl, it had already accumulated more than 20 million views. That’s how much a big idea tightened up with celebrity endorsement can worth.
