Celebrity Endorsement: What not to do

It's nearly a year now since the starting gun was fired and the country went 'zoink' (in the words of Great Uncle Boris) for Olympomania. Since then, a number of savvy brands have jumped on the bandwaggon, realised the popular appeal of sports personalities, and used their image to boost sales. It's a common but risky tactic, either flourishing or falling flat on its face.

Perhaps most successfully, Virgin Media used the face of Usain Bolt to attract customers. There's nothing particularly broadband-ocentric about Usain Bolt, though I'm sure he likes to surf the interweb from time to time. But this doesn't matter. The advertisers have cleverly worked in a pun about speed; because we know from the Olympics that Bolt is possibly the fastest man alive. We can chuckle and give ourselves a self-congratulatory pat on the back for recognising what makes the pun a pun.

Mo Farah is another obvious choice for the savvy advertising agency: a hero of the public, famous for acing pretty much every long-distance running event. Virgin Media make a cheap pun on his name: 'You can't say Farah than that'. But his uses are more diverse, because he stands for endurance and speed, hence his appearence in this Lucozade ad.

It all makes sense: Mo is, in the public myth, A Sportsman, with no other strings to his bow that we care to know about. Needless to say, he would be completely misplaced in an advert for weedkiller, even if he is a budding gardener on the side.

So with this in mind, Santander's (probably very expensive) use of Jessica Ennis, Jenson Button and Rory McIlroy is all the more perplexing.

It smacks of gratuitous celebrity endorsement. Our friends Jessica, Jenson and Rory are used purely as ciphers of Fame with a capital F, without even the faintest glimmer of a pun or clin d'oeil to them being sports personalities. (Unless it's an extended parody of Virgin Media's use of sports personalities, debased into some kind of meta-statement about the use of celebrity endorsement.) I very much doubt it, though; Santander have gone so far as to stick cardboard cut-outs of Jessica in their window, with speech bubbles saying vapid things about interest and APR and without even the slightest hint of a pun.

Try harder next time, Santander!