Celebrity PR – What’s the value?

One week ago today TOWIE star Gemma Collins sensationally packed her bags and left the celeb infested Australian ‘jungle’ citing “it was just toooooo hard”. Don’t start feeling too sorry for old Gems though, she still banked a reported cool £42k. Not bad for 3 days work. Here we take a look at celebrity PR, the pros and cons in a socially switched-on world.

Many have been left outraged by her sudden departure, the main reason being that she received her full appearance fee despite her short stay. Why would ITV still pay Gemma seeing as she didn’t uphold her commitment to the show? Simple… Awareness.

In reality, Gemma Collins is a huge star on the continual rise, a commodity of the ITV reality TV empire. Google Gemma Collins and the first three links all relate to her ‘time’ in the jungle. Scroll down and even more stories pop up about her I’m a celeb experiences.

Albeit brief, Gemma  has managed to turn her negative into a positive by capitalising on her trauma and in turn, ITV are capitalising on the buzz surrounding her departure. Gemma’s appearance fee actually pales in comparison to the value of the column inches, TV exposure and comments left on the Daily Mail celebrity sidebar. She created a sensation around the show within the first three days of the new series and ITV are more than aware that her somewhat irrational behaviour has given the programme a huge boost in ratings.

While most would imagine the execs would be aggrieved to see Gemma leave, in reality they were more likely to be secretly pleased as the waves of controversy started to become bigger and bigger and conversation increased for the show which is now in it’s fourteenth series. Ask 100 people on the street who was in this years show & it would be unlikely that they would name check Tinchy Stryder, Michael Buerk or even Melanie Sykes, they’d probably remember Gemma, in most part for all the drama she caused.

So to quote MasterCard, there are some things money can’t buy, but for £42k you can get an outspoken Essex girl plus hundreds of thousands of column inches (& that’s priceless.)