IELTS Speaking Part 2: An Advertisement with a Famous Person – Model Answers 2026

This is a new Part 2 topic in the official IELTS Speaking question bank for May–August 2026. You have one minute to prepare and two minutes to speak. Start with the advertisement directly.

Cue Card

Describe an advertisement with a famous person in it.

You should say:
– Who the person is
– Where you can see it
– What the advertisement is about
– And explain how you feel about the advertisement

Model Answer

A few years ago Nike released a campaign built around Colin Kaepernick, the American football player who became well known for kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games as a protest against racial injustice in the United States. The advertisement ran extensively across television, online platforms, and appeared on large format billboards in major cities across the US and UK.

The central image was a close photograph of Kaepernick’s face with the line Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything written across it. No product was shown. No discount was offered. The advertisement made no direct attempt to sell anything in the conventional sense.

What the campaign did instead was take a clear and public position on one of the most divisive social issues in American public life at that time, and associate Nike’s brand with that position entirely. The response was immediate and polarised. Some consumers burned their Nike shoes publicly and posted the footage online. The company’s stock dropped briefly in the days following the campaign launch. Within a month it had recovered and gone higher. Nike reported a significant increase in sales following the campaign, particularly among younger consumers.

My feeling about it is that it is one of the most interesting advertisements of the past decade, not because it was brave, though it was, but because it demonstrated something about how brand communication had changed. The most effective way to reach a specific audience is increasingly not to appeal to everyone but to take a position that creates a clear signal about who you are for and who you are not for. Nike made a calculated decision that the consumers it wanted to keep were worth more than the ones it was willing to lose. That calculation turned out to be correct.

Why This Works

The answer describes a real, significant campaign with specific details (the image, the tagline, the response). The analysis in the final paragraph goes beyond description to genuine marketing insight.

📌 Band 7-8 Vocabulary:
– polarised — divided into two completely opposing groups
– conventional — following what is traditionally done
– calculated decision — a choice made after careful consideration of the likely outcomes
– brand communication — the way a company conveys its identity to the public
– signal — a clear indication of something to those who can read it

IELTS Speaking Part 3: Advertisement Questions and Model Answers

Question 1: What are the advantages and disadvantages of advertisements?

Model Answer:
Advertisements fund most of the free media content that people consume, which is a genuine structural benefit that is easy to overlook. They also provide legitimate information about products and services that people want to know exist. The disadvantages are significant. Advertising creates artificial desire for things people would not have wanted without prompting, which drives overconsumption with real environmental consequences. Targeted digital advertising has also raised serious privacy concerns. The Cambridge Analytica scandal in the US and UK demonstrated that the same infrastructure used to sell products can be used to manipulate political behaviour at scale, which is a qualitatively different kind of harm.

Question 2: Why are many advertisements endorsed by celebrities?

Model Answer:
Because it works, and the mechanism is well understood. Consumers transfer the qualities they associate with a celebrity onto the product the celebrity endorses. When LeBron James promotes a sports brand in the US, the aspiration attached to his performance transfers partially onto the brand. When a British actor known for sophistication promotes a luxury watch brand, the same transfer happens. The effectiveness declines when the connection between the celebrity and the product is implausible or when the celebrity’s personal behaviour contradicts the values the brand is trying to project. Tiger Woods’ endorsement losses following his personal scandals demonstrated how quickly that value can reverse.

Question 3: What is the most important factor in an advertisement?

Model Answer:
Relevance to the intended audience matters more than anything else. An advertisement that speaks directly to the specific desires, fears, or values of the people it is trying to reach will consistently outperform a technically superior advertisement aimed at everyone. The advertising theorist David Ogilvy, who built one of the most influential agencies in US and UK advertising history, argued that the consumer is not an idiot but your wife, meaning the most effective advertisements respect the intelligence of the audience. Advertisements that condescend or that offer no genuine reason to care about the product produce short-term awareness and long-term damage to the brand.

Question 4: Why are some advertisements boring?

Model Answer:
Most boring advertisements are boring because they were designed by committee. When every decision about an advertisement has to satisfy multiple stakeholders with different risk tolerances, the result is usually something that offends no one and moves no one. The creative risk that makes advertising memorable is systematically removed by approval processes that prioritise safety over impact. There is also a fundamental tension in advertising between what is creatively interesting and what is legally defensible, particularly in regulated industries like pharmaceuticals and financial services in the UK and US. The most boring advertisements in existence are probably prescription drug commercials, which are required to spend roughly equal time listing side effects as promoting the product.

Examiner Tips for IELTS Speaking Part 2 Advertisement

Tip 1: Choose an advertisement with a story behind it.
The Nike Kaepernick campaign has a narrative, a reaction, and a measurable outcome. That gives you a complete answer structure.

Tip 2: Go beyond describing what the ad looked like.
The analysis of what Nike’s decision-making reveals about modern brand communication is what makes this answer stand out.

Tip 3: For Part 3, use real named examples.
LeBron James, Tiger Woods, David Ogilvy, Cambridge Analytica. Specific and named is always stronger than general and vague.

Common Mistakes on This Topic

Describing only what the advertisement looked like without analysing what it was doing
Saying an advertisement was good or bad without explaining the reasoning
Part 3 answers that give only a personal preference without any supporting evidence
Opening with “I would like to describe an advertisement I saw…”

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a confirmed IELTS Speaking Part 2 topic for 2026?
Yes. An Advertisement with a Famous Person appears in the official IELTS Speaking question bank for May–August 2026 as a new topic.

Does the famous person have to be from my country?
No. International celebrities known across multiple markets are equally valid and often give you more to say.

What if I cannot remember a specific advertisement?
Describe the type of advertisement you find most effective or most interesting, using a real example of a brand campaign even if you cannot recall every detail.