Choose your Brand Ambassador Carefully

If you have seen any commercial television in the last week, you'll have seen this Thomas Cook Ad featuring the lovely face and hushed tones of Louise Redknapp and her distinctly less silky-voiced husband, footballer turned pundit and all-round-nice-guy Jamie Redknapp.



Fair enough. It's January, everyone's booking a holiday and we should expect to be targeted with advertising. Jamie and Louise Redknapp are a well known couple and make things look a bit glamorous, right? Well, Louise does.

Jamie is popular with the fairer sex and seems like a good bloke, but not necessarily that good a flight companion if you believe this article last June in The Sun.

"Travel with Thomas Cook, especially if you're banned from other airlines"

Is this ideal for a holiday company? Do Thomas Cook not do holidays to the sort of destination, for the sort of people, Redknapp and Gray were allegedly disparaging?

I appreciate this isn't the biggest scandal of all time, but it was something, as a football fan who also manages to inhale a load of useless information, I instantly associated with Redknapp on seeing him reclining in a ludicrously roomy flight seat.

Still, at least he isn't whoring around the whole family connection to several different advertisers.



I don't want to make it seem like the age-old use of a famous face to generate a bit of reflected glory for your brand has suddenly become a bad thing, but the increasing glare of the media has managed to bring controversy to brands associated with big names like Kate Moss (which was always a risk, to be fair), Thierry Henry (perhaps unfairly) and even, and most spectacularly, the most bankable Brand Ambassador Tiger Woods (a good couple of months for the Gillette Marketing Department).

Just don't get me started on Kerry Katona...