Louis Vuitton, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. The Greatest Marketing Stunt of the Century, or just Hype Driven Vanity-Metrics?

On the 20th of November 2022, popular fashion brand Louis Vuitton released what marketing practitioners loosely refer to as the greatest photo of all time, or a marketing masterpiece. A series of Instagram posts portrayed the two football superstars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in a chess match on a LV checkerboard-branded suitcase. The players and the brand’s posts quickly went viral, amassing millions of views and resulting in Instagram’s 2nd most liked post of all times. However, were these posts truly a success for the sponsoring brand, or was the social media active marketing practitioners’ community falling victim to overhyped vanity metrics? To find out, this research project tested via eye-tracking technology the attention distribution spread between the two celebrities and the sponsoring brand. Though this study does not aim to performance evaluate the campaign, the eye tracking study, in combination with diligent brand-recall measures, provides valuable insights into the likely brand-lift. The study relied on a demographic sample of Chinese students. Due to the Internet-censorship in China, the recruited sample has proven unaware of these viral Instagram posts. The study found an unequal attention distribution in favor of the celebrity players. The attention spread was explained by the posting entity; the post by the brand showcased the least skewed attention distribution, the post by Ronaldo the highest. Findings are supported by existing celebrity endorsement studies and highlight the importance of contemporary academic research to stimulate and engage with the marketing practitioners’ community on the effectiveness of vanity metric driven influencer campaigns.