From Michael Jordan's Boxers to Gronk's Gonads, Five Ways Celeb Endorsements Have Really Changed

Last year, the NFL hunk Rob Gronkowski did what many retired athletes do—he appeared in an advertisement. Gronk’s no stranger to hawking stuff. His muscular frame and goofy smile have appeared on behalf of Cheerios, Lyft, T-Mobile, and Cheerios, among others. But this ad was different. “You might know me as football star Rob Gronkowki,” said Gronk, standing in his bathroom at home. “But the truth is, I stink.” Gronk then grabs some Dove whole body deodorant and proceeds to apply it everywhere—on his feet, his inner thighs, and then on the Gronkowski family jewels. (That part’s behind a sign that reads: “He’s actually putting it everywhere,”). With a wink at the camera, this 46-second endorsement is complete. Needless to say, this isn’t your father’s deodorant ad. Like most effective marketing ideas, the celebrity pitch has been around for a long time. But to stay effective, it’s had to change with the times, too. Few ad men understand that dynamic better than Doug Shabelman and Marc Ippolito, the CEO and president, respectively, of Burns Entertainment. For the last 55 years, the Chicago-based shop has orchestrated some of the advertising’s most memorable celebrity-brand collabs, from Johnny Bench spraying his bench with Krylon (1978) to Michael Jordan holding his Hanes boxer shorts (1995) to the aforementioned personal ablutions of Gronk. ADWEEK caught up with Shabelman and Ippolito to talk about five ways that celeb endorsements have changed over the last half century. 1. The definition of “celebrity” is always changing Half a century ago, a brand in search of a celebrity was lucky to land a ball player. That’s how consumers would see New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath pitching them on La-Z-Boy recliners and Cincinnati Red’s Pete Rose singing about Ice Blue Aqua Velva aftershave. But the media fragmenting that began with cable TV—and accelerated through Web 1.0 and then social media—had created wholly new categories of fame. “[With] segmentation, you had stars out there who weren’t just the A-list movie stars,” Shabelman said. “Emeril Lagasse came out of New Orleans and all of a sudden he got a [Food Network] show.” For brands, a broader selection of luminaries has not only let them address target audiences more precisely but, overall, has lowered the cost. “Companies now don’t have to spend Coca-Cola levels of media investment,” Shabelman said. 2. The old stigmas are gone After the Hollywood studio system collapsed and film stars controlled their own careers, many didn’t want to stoop to advertising work. One exception was screen legends long past their prime, which is how a 66-year-old Bette Davis—cigarette in hand—wound up in ads for Jim Beam bourbon in 1974. On the few occasions that Hollywood royalty did take money from a brand, they kept it hidden. In 1996, for example, Brad Pitt hawked Edwin jeans—but only in Japan. Today, it’s no longer embarrassing to take money from a brand. “You see the biggest names doing endorsement deals and the stigma isn’t there,” Ippolito said. How’d things change? For starters, the web made it impossible to hide anything. And the creation of influencers meant that more traditional stars suddenly had competition for endorsement gigs. “A lot of celebrities were saying, 'wait a minute, I can do a one-day TV shoot and maybe half a day for print and I’m going to get $500,000? A million dollars?'" Shabelman said. "They realized that the payday for the workload was really great." 3. One endorsement now lives on many channels A generation ago, an endorsement deal “was TV, print, radio—that was it,” Ippolito said. Today it’s those three media, plus TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and more. “We’re not going to do one 30-second [ad], pay someone millions of dollars and that’s it,” Shabelman said. Filling manifold platforms with celebrity content often means the brand or its agency adapting the creative work it shot to suit the individual outlets. But increasingly, celebrities are doing that work themselves. A single social media post from Kim Kardashian will set a brand back nearly $2.2 million, according to 2024 data from Influencer Marketing Hub. Obviously, an influencer will cost far less. While a brand surrenders a degree of autonomy by letting a star create her own endorsement messages, it’s also getting authentic content it couldn’t have made on its own. “A lot of these influencers [will] take your brief, create the content, and give it back to the client [brand],” Ippolito said. 4. The celeb had better fit the brand For most of advertising history, it was anyone’s guess if the stars in the ads used—or even liked—the products they were posing with. Did Zsa Zsa Gabor actually have Smirnoff vodka in her liquor cabinet at home? Did Dean Martin really run around airports in search of a Bell System payphone? Probably not. Today, some of that disconnect still exists—especially in categories like snack foods. “It’s understood that you don’t need the belief that [the celebrity] is actually using that product,” Ippolito said. But in most cases, a credible link between star and brand is essential. When TrimSpa endorser Anna Nicole Smith was found dead in 2007, TMZ ran photos of her refrigerator shelf backed with archrival SlimFast. No brand wants that sort of problem. Which is why a celebrity’s regular use of a product (at least in public) is often contractually stipulated. “Organic and authentic are the most commonly used words in briefs right now,” Shabelman said. 5. Brands may not know what’s good for them Back when professional athletes were the only celebs who’d do ads, it was comparatively simple for a brand like Rolaids to pick out Dodgers’ manager Tommy LaSorta or Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach—both men appeared in an ad that Burns Entertainment founder David Burns put together in 1983. Over time, however, celebrities have been getting younger. Harvard University research shows that most famous people become famous before age 30. So a CEO or CMO may not have even heard of the star who could be a good fit as an endorser. “As a 55 year old male, I'm not the best person to pick the 20-year-old influencer to appeal to a female [consumer aged] 18 to 20,” Ippolito said. “Sometimes, you do have clients saying, ‘I don't know who that is.”

Branding

From Michael Jordan's Boxers to Gronk's Gonads, Five Ways Celeb Endorsements Have Really Changed

How an age-old marketing idea has stayed fresh

Robert Klara

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