oprah

Once upon a time, hiring a celebrity to endorse a product was considered a magic bullet: run an ad with Cary Grant driving your sports car or Jack Benny buying your gasoline, and you could pack your bags for Easy Street. But does that still hold true? A new study from Ace Metrix shows that companies still pay through the nose for celebs, but they aren't getting much bang for their buck. Ace looked at more than 2,600 ads that ran in 2010, and they found that the high cost of celeb spokespeople rarely pays off: [C]ontrary to popular wisdom—celebrity ads do not perform any better than...