In today's world, celebrity status is very important and strong

marketing-communication instruments that can be effective depending on the product, the brand, the target group, and many other aspects. However, advertisement and endorsement are two instruments that when combined can be very successful.

Eventually, advertising and endorsement's synergy will become unimportant. In the beginning of a campaign, both are required to launch a successful campaign. Conversely, advertising will become self-sufficient without endorsement. Once a product is associated with a celebrity, brand awareness is achieved. This is needed to happen, because the cost of a celebrity endorsement is high. An example of this is the recent Sprite soft-drink campaign "Obey Your Thirst". Instead of using celebrity endorsements they played on the idea of drinking a soft drink will not make you jump higher or run faster. The advertisement tells the consumer to just "Obey Your Thirst." A celebrity endorsement was no longer needed to sell the product.

If a company has the means necessary to combine celebrity endorsements and advertising, then they have the potential to launch an extremely beneficial marketing campaign. Because of the high public profiles that most celebrities have and their influence of their audience and fans and the wide reach that advertising has, these two marketing-communication tools will create a strong marketing-communication strategy.

Although there are many positive aspects of using sports celebrities as endorsements in advertising, there are also negative aspects. The first issue concerns the high financial costs of securing high profile sports stars. Pepsi paid Shaquille O'Neil 25 million U.S. dollars to endorse the soda product, and Nike paid Tiger Woods 40 million U.S. dollars to endorse their new campaign focusing on young people. Although these large companies do not have a problem spending top dollar necessary to acquire famous personalities, most small companies struggle to afford any celebrities. Smaller companies losses are greater when something goes wrong. For example, when Dallas Cowboy wide receiver, Michael Erwin, was caught by the police, Nike was not phased. However, there were 13 small Toyota dealerships that suffered tremendously. They had the Cowboys star lined up to do a series of commercials, worth about $500,000. Not only did they lose the money invested in Irvin and the ads!

Non-users are also an important target group for this marketing combination. Non-users are consumers that do not use the product and are not looking to use. This group is also effected by endorsement and advertising. With the combination of the accessibility of television ads and print ads, and the effectiveness of celebrity endorsement, the non-user cannot resist the urge to purchase the product involved. The Tiger Woods epidemic is an example. After Tiger Woods entered the scene, the golf world was turned upside down. Woods broke every rule and has redefined golf as a sport. Nike saw Woods and recognized him as an endorsement-advertising machine. They began a whole campaign that centered around the "generation x", an audience that was never associated with golf before. Nike took the non-user target group, and persuaded them that golf is not just for old boring men by using a young vibrant star that they could rela

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