Power of celebrity?
- 23 Aug 07, 11:20 AM
Celebrity endorsement is nothing new. A quick search of even Pope Leo XIII and Queen Victoria were at it as far back as the 19th century. In their cases it was testimonials to heighten interest in patent medicines.
It was probably Band Aid in 1984 which first harnessed the power of celebrity on a mass scale to highlight a particular cause. And since then, charities have become ever more sophisticated in getting their message to a wide audience by tapping into society’s obsession with celebrity.
Breakfast is frequently offered a famous name using their A-list status to draw attention to others less fortunate than themselves. Many of those offers are politely declined but some do end up on the sofa, as did the British-born Hollywood actress Sienna Miller. She’d been to India to highlight the issue of global warming and was interviewed by us, Radio Four’s Today and ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ News 24 as she encouraged society to think about the environment.
Nobody is pretending that her opinion is worth more than others but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what she has to say. She wasn’t gifted six minutes of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ One air time to preach on the social injustices of climate change.
In fact, she had to defend why we should listen to her opinion and were her actions of flying to India hypocritical, actually increasing her carbon footprint.
On Breakfast, Bill and Kate challenged her repeatedly on her beliefs; she gave an illuminating, insider’s description of how Hollywood, a major, global industry, was adjusting the way it operates in response to concerns over the environmental threat to our planet.
You can’t escape from the fact that Sienna is one of our most in-demand actresses. This doesn’t give her automatic and unchallenged access to our viewers but it does make her well placed to outline the movie industry’s reactions to a worldwide phenomenon.
Stephen James-Yeoman is assistant editor,
