Celebrities, Advertising Endorsement, and Political Marketing in Spain: The Popular Party’s April 2019 Election Campaign

Abstract

One of political marketing’s theoretical tenets is the translation of commercial advertising techniques to politics. This paper focuses on celebrity endorsement as a commercial technique which is translated into political campaigning. Celebrity endorsement relates directly to celebrity politics, that is, the result of celebrity culture getting in touch with politics, as a way of revitalizing the offering of parties and candidates. In this context, our study analyzes the representation and use of celebrity politicians in Spain by the conservative Popular Party (PP) during the April 2019 national election. In order to shed light on the way celebrities were used in the PP’s social media campaign, we content-analyze 1,117 Twitter messages taken from the party’s profile, as well as conservative presidential candidate Pablo Casado’s profile. Analytical variables include frequency of mentions, the strategic axis (rational/emotional) with which celebrities were depicted, the features which were highlighted, and the type of endorsement performed by the celebrities. Message topics and functions were also added to the analysis. Results indicate a weak and flawed strategic use of celebrities, who were scarcely mentioned, and depicted in a non-innovative, traditional fashion.

Keywords:

• Advertising
• celebrity endorsement
• celebrity politics
• social media and politics
• political marketing

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the company Dinamic Área for capturing the tweets with its product OPILEAK, as well as students Pilar Alonso del Real, Julia León, Daniel López and Marta Osuna for their collaboration with coding tasks.

Disclosure statement

The author(s) declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 An analysis was not performed on the Twitter accounts of the celebrities, because not all of them had one on this SNS.

Additional information

Funding

The work presented in this paper was performed in the framework of the research group IDECO, Grupo de Investigación en Comunicación Política, Ideología y Propaganda (Universidad de Sevilla, SEJ-539), funded by the Junta de Andalucía (Consejería de Economía, Innovación, Ciencia y Empleo), ref. 2017/SEJ-539.