Olympics medal winners are now entering a bonus round as potential product endorsers, but the playing field is a limited one based on emotional appeal and primetime profiles.
The unforeseen marketing star emerging from the Beijing games could be Jamaican runner Usain Bolt, who displayed a panache equal to his speed during the primetime coverage of his golden sprints in the 100-meter and 200-meter races.
“He’s a gold mine right now,” sports marketing consultant Ryan Schinman of Platinum Rye Entertainment, said. “Forget about the records that he’s broken, but it’s the way he did it.”
Schinman figures Bolt’s name is a natural fit for a brand such as Duracell. He’s a fit for any brand pushing selling itself on speed, and U.K. cable company Virgin Media already wants him for broadband ads.
Bolt had a pre-Olympics deal with Puma, and marketing analysts figure deals with other global brands may follow.
Michael Phelps has already earned the right to appear on the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box, and the Sport Illustrated cover is now being marketed as a poster featuring the athlete wearing his eight gold medals. But Phelps may be limited because he already had several deals worth $7 million before Beijing
U.S. gymnastic gold medalists Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin are likely marketing darlings. But Johnson already has deals with Coca-Cola, Adidas and McDonald’s and Liukin has partnerships with Adidas, AT&T and Visa, among others.
Johnson is likely to gain more from her “corn-fed, Midwestern appeal,” according to Bob Dorfman, vice president of Baker Street Partners, a company that tracks star appeal.
Another consensus post-Olympics winner is 41-year-old swimmer Dara Torres, whose multi-silver medal performance has what Dorfman calls a “never-too-old” emotional appeal.
A gold medalist like U.S. decathlon star Bryan Clay would have had a higher profile in past Olympics, but his exploits got next to no primetime play.
“Now you have competing sports like volleyball and baseball that have taken up more of the TV time,” Doug Shadelman, president of Burns Entertainment, said. “Other sports have taken attention away from the decathlon.”
The golden U.S. beach volleyball tandem of Kerri Walsh and Misty May could cash in on their compelling primetime performance. But like all the other Olympians, they’ll have to move as deftly as they did on the sand in Beijing.
Olympic fame fades fast after the Olympic flame goes out.
“They only have the attention of marketers for the next month,” Schinman said, due to the “peaks and valleys” that are part of the Olympic terrain.
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