Celebrities pitching products are a waste of money

Many of them get paid absurd amounts and yet celebrity endorsers often do little to enhance a product, according to Peter Daboll, the CEO of research firm Ace Metrix. Tiger Woods is an obvious example, but other pitch people are ineffective as well in ads. From Ad Age:

We set out to understand whether celebrities today are really worth the significant investment that brands were making. We studied every nationally televised ad for the first 11 months of 2010 and found that celebrity ads performed either below average or merely equaled it. Specifically, our study, 2010 Celebrity Advertisements: Exposing a Myth of Advertising Effectiveness, 2010, showed that fewer than 12% of ads using celebrities exceeded a 10% lift, and one-fifth of celebrity ads had a negative impact on advertising effectiveness.