SaatchiKevin.com: You, Me, Celebrity

This story is an interesting piece found on an interesting site - a vanity address for Saatchi & Saatchi's CEO Kevin Roberts. The site includes a gallery of essays (it cries out for a blog), including this one by Myra Stark, a member of Saatchi's strategic planning group.

In it, she focuses on our culture's recent interest in making everyday people celebrities, pundits and role models, as can be seen in the nearly simultaneous rise in popularity of reality shows, memoirs of nobodies, post-9/11 everyman heroes, webloggers and The Sims.

She's on to something. As to how this translates for marketers, I like her advice:

We trust real people. One way to cut through the cynicism about big business and corporate utterances is to look to people who "live the brand," the real people who believe in it. A few years ago, Dupont built a TV campaign around the scientists who created the Dupont products. In a similar fashion, packaging, the most intimate experience consumers have with the brand, could build trust by celebrating the real people behind the brand.

Thanks to reader David Libby for the link.