We get a lot of press releases at The A.V. Club and many of them are strange, dumb, shameless, or some combination of the above. With Stop The Presses, we share them with you.
Even now, in the Internet age, there are some questions that puzzle us still. For example: “What kind of watch does Mark Wahlberg wear?” Fortunately, a new iPhone app seeks to solve that age old query. The Finest Watches app, produced by a watch retailer also called Finest Watches offers, “not only a catalog of the company's high-end watch offerings, but also celebrity photos beneath the watches owned by the celebrities.” How better to know, for example, that Shia Labeouf sports an IWC Portuguese Perpetual Calendar timepiece, or that Steven Tyler has a Rolex Cosmograph.
Why should anyone care about what watches celebrities are wearing? Let Finest Watches explain:
Celebrity trends are big business and there is no question as to whether or not celebrity endorsements work. The basic idea of an endorsement is pretty simple. People like celebrities. If those celebrities say that they like a product, or in this case wear a particular watch, people will like that product, to. So, what accounts for this celebrity effect? Endorsements could be a signal of quality — but the modern consumer is sophisticated. They know money's changing hands. At a deeper level, we seem to crave connection to the famous and the powerful.
Of course, Finest Watches sells only the finest watches, and therefore all the watches pictured on celebrities and in the app are incredibly expensive, thereby making them unattainable to almost everyone who might download a free iPhone app. But hey, isn’t it worth a second mortgage to own the same brand of watch Diddy wears from time to time?