When celebrity endorsements of technology go wrong

Celebrity endorsement of new technology is nothing new, but neither is something going wrong with that endorsement.

The latest blunder comes courtesy of Ashton Kutcher, a celebrity investor in Interaxon, the Toronto-based company promoting its buzzy Muse Headband, a device that can sense brainwaves and is intended to help people train their minds to be calmer.

On Tuesday, Kutcher tweeted out a picture to his 16 million-plus followers with the note: “Day 1 with @ChooseMuse. Excited to learn from this incredible technology.”

The only problem? The picture was quickly revealed to have been Photoshopped: Kutcher’s name was added to the device screen, and it showed that he had achieved “892 points, so far,” giving the impression that the actor had actually used the device.

It turns out the original image was taken by Tom Emrich, a Toronto writer and wearable technology evangelist, who was surprised to find his photo had been altered by a celebrity who is considered very tech savvy.

Emrich saw the photo on Betakit — a site that he writes for — and originally thought that the site had reused an older image from a previous post. Then he looked closer and noticed the name and score had been changed from his original image.

“When I got home and I did a side-by-side comparison, I hesitated, because I wanted to be 100 per cent sure before I responded to Ashton, but my dirty floor gave it away,” says Emrich. “I recognized the floors. I remember how I wish I made the floors a little bit cleaner when I was taking a picture.”

Emrich tweeted at Kutcher in a light manner, comparing the two images.

He says he’s happy the Muse is getting some attention, but is a little disappointed by Kutcher.

“I am little bit saddened that he hasn’t actually tried it,” says Emrich.

“It would have taken him five seconds to put it on and take a picture, even if he didn’t turn it on, and that would have done so much more for the company. What I am really hoping is this will inspire him to open that package and actually try it.”

Some of Kutcher’s eagle-eyed Twitter followers noticed the image manipulation, and Valleywag, Gawker’s Silicon Valley-watching blog, wrote a post about it titled, “Why Would Ashton Kutcher Photoshop a Tweet About a Startup?”

A spokesperson for Interaxon responded to Valleywag saying that they weren’t involved in the picture and “This was all Ashton’s initiative.”

The incident shows the trouble tech companies can have when they try to earn cool cachet by getting a celebrity to endorse a product. There is a growing list of stories of cellphone companies paying celebrities to use a product, only to have their true tech preferences revealed.

Ellen DeGeneres gave Samsung a huge coup with her celebrated Oscar selfie, which was taken with a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, part of an endorsement deal with the Korean electronics manufacturer. But she was also found to be using an iPhone backstage at the event.

The same thing happened with Alicia Keys, who was named by Blackberry last year as global creative director. A few weeks later, she was caught tweeting from an iPhone. She blamed the incident on being hacked.

One of the most lucrative current examples of a celebrity endorsing a tech product is Beats Electronics, which produces Dr. Dre’s popular line of headphones, Beats by Dre. Its huge growth can be attributed to its use of celebrities in ads and product placement, beginning with its legendary namesake rapper.

But that success didn’t trickle down to its original manufacturer. Beats headphones were originally designed by Monster, which is best known for making HDMI cables. Last year, Gizmodo had a long post detailing how Monster signed away all its technology to Dre and his partner Jimmy Iovine in the endorsement deal, essentially becoming a licensed provider of the technology. Eventually, Dre and Iovine didn’t renew that deal with Monster, and sought investment from HTC. The company was most recently purchased by Apple for $3.2 billion.

There are also minefields in trying to target celebrities, as Facebook very recently learned. Just last week, the company launched Mentions, a VIP app only for celebrities and other public figures to help them better manage and message their followers. Shortly after launching, Canadian actor William Shatner did a five post review on his Tumblr blog summing it up with:

“I’m not quite sure why Facebook released this app for ‘celebrities.’ It seems to be ill conceived.”

As technology moves more mainstream and becomes a part of everybody’s lifestyle, celebrity endorsements and investment are not going anywhere, although whenever these types of gaffes happen, it just cause will always call into question just how genuine they are.