When it comes to celebrities remember to KISS!

I don’t mean the luvvie style kissing, although that’s often good as well, but the “Keep It Simple, Stupid!” principle; or as Johnny Mercer once wrote:

“You've got to accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

Don't mess with Mister In-Between”

Any excuse for an Oscar nominated show tune on a Friday afternoon. What better than a bit of Bing and Bette!


In general the best results always come from minimising the amount of time you need from a celebrity but maximising the benefit from that time.

A terrific example is Christian Aid’s use of the world’s funniest Iranian comedian, Omid Djalili for their Quiz Aid fundraiser. He’ll be hosting his own hour long virtual quiz on Twitter next Monday via his Twitter account which means they’ll be reaching nearly 29,000 who can play along and get the message about Christian Aid at the same time. What’s particularly great about this is that whilst Omid’s doing it from Chritian Aid’s head office, he could be doing it from anywhere – even on the sofa at home in his underwear a la Jim Royle.

In addition to this one hour, Omid has done some radio including BBC 6 Music’s breakfast show and BBC Radio Shropshire. Hey, don’t knock Shropshire, I’ve been there. Well more accurately actually I went through it on the train once, heading for somewhere interesting. Eagle eyed readers who clicked on both links will have noticed that the interviews went out on different days but I suspect he will have done one morning of interviews. What the 106,000 listeners in Shropshire will have been listening to was a pre-recorded interview with Omid in a London studio – the joys of broadcast trickery! It’s also clever to use someone who can appeal to local and network radio audiences which have very different audience profiles.

The half day of radio interviews is a terrific way of reaching lots of people. Working from a single studio in London your celebrity can be on a huge number of radio stations across the country – if you’re lucky you can be doing a different station every 10-15 minutes.

I make that about 5 hours of Omid’s time including the quiz. Whilst I am by no means suggesting that’s not a lot, it’s been set up in a way that is incredibly easy and maximises the value of the time whilst minimising the effort on his part (I bet he doesn’t write his own questions). It also allows supporters to interact with him in a way that just a photo and quote in the fundraising pack never does.

The only pity is that he’s not in the video which is unfortunate because he’d be far more entertaining than this pair of badly voiced sock puppets.



Something like the David Schneider in a crop-top video would have been far more engaging.