5 of the most ridiculous celebrity tech endorsements
Sometimes celebrity endorsements make sense, sometimes they don't. These are the latter
Celebs lead a charmed life, being feted by the press, dating the glitterati and using their name to shift products by the boatload (hello, Beats headphones). Sometimes, though, those product endorsements take a turn for the daft. Like the following.
Will.i.am foto.sosho iPhone camera
Black Eyed Peas member Will.i.am is now in the business of garish mobile accessories, the first of which is an iPhone case that turns your iPhone into a digital camera. 14MP picture quality is promised along with a superior flash for lighting the dark. So how much is the cost of turning your contemporary iPhone into an old-school camera? A cool £200 if you like black and an eye-watering £300 if you fancy a bit of white and gold. And we thought the name was crazy.
Lady Gaga Polaroid glasses
Twitter and pop queen Lady Gaga didn’t just endorse a product – the music juggernaut was appointed as a creative director at Polaroid. Her efforts bore fruit in the form of a pair of wearable camera glasses embedded with a 1.5in LCD display known as the GL20s, as well as the GL30 digital camera and a GL10 printer for putting your snaps to glossy paper. Of Gaga’s Grey Label products, only the GL10 printer has seen the light of day since the range was revealed in 2010 – the GL20 and GL30 were merely ‘conceptual ideas’. And no, we don’t know where you can buy Lady Gaga’s hat.
Motorola Aura
Not only does David Beckham like to cruise up rivers in speed boats at big London events, he’s a serial product endorser – and not just of his own lady-attracting wares. He was portrayed as the Terminator when shamelessly plugging the Motorola Aura fashion phone – which was, well, a bit odd. This feature phone packed a round sapphire-coated display, rather awesome styling and a hefty price tag of £1,400. Pricey, but a bit of a steal when compared with those mad-expensive Vertus – if you could put up with the lack of 3G. Not David’s finest hour.
The Black Eyed Peas Experience
Oh, hello again Will.i.am. This time, he brought his pop chums along for this Xbox 360 game. No mere app, this was a full-blown Kinect dance game similar to Dance Central that allowed you to jive like one of the Peas. Fun in small doses – depending on your tolerance for the Peas’ brand of pop-rap – it was also entirely without shame. Not that it bothered Will.i.am and co, who were presumably laughing all the way to the bank.
Mr. T FlavorWave Turbo Oven
Who wouldn’t want to cook an entire turkey in just 20 minutes? Yes, tough guy and A-Team member Mr T decided that he spent too long in the kitchen waiting for his protein-based meals to cook, which is why he endorsed an oven that uses three types of heating to nuke food into an edible state. The only fool we pity is anyone who bought one of these awfully marketed ovens.
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Dan Grabham
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