Harshil Karia on Leveraging Celebrity Brand Ambassadors on Social Media

For quite some time now, a lot of brands have been leveraging celebrity appeal on social media. They not only enjoy great fan following but can also influence the decision making process for the selection of a brand. Harshil Karia of Foxymoron, feels that brands are sort of halfway there when it comes to leveraging celebrity brand ambassadors on social media. A year ago the story was completely different.

A year ago, in the eyes of the marketers, social media had not scaled as much. There was always one question - Would the cost be worth it? Today, brands are actually leveraging celebrity brand ambassadors on social media. He gives the example of Maybelline New York India's first crowdsourced KISS Song. To make it even better, they shot a video featuring brand ambassador, Alia Bhatt. This way they made it an extendable media property. This reflects a sea change in the way of thinking compared to earlier.

So agencies are now seeing how they can use more of a celebrity's time for the brand - so 4 hours' worth of celebrity time translates to 3 hours' worth of content. Brands have also become smarter in terms of how they leverage the brand ambassadors in a larger way. The answer, according to Harshil, lies in creating a larger property - where brand ambassadors are integrated into digital properties.

He also gave another example of Garnier Men India's Powerlight A Village campaign where they roped in brand ambassador John Abraham to create a lot of online content.

Brands are essentially using these known faces to effectively make a difference to their brand in the online space.