Hiring a Celebrity Athlete to Endorse Your Product

Hiring a celebrity athlete to endorse your product doesn’t just happen with a phone call or an email.  Here are some steps to help streamline the process and save you and everyone else involved some time.

Determine if Your Product Will Align with the Athlete

You may love Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks, but is the product that you potentially want him to endorse going to be the right fit?  With any marketing strategy you will need to consider the demographics that you intend to reach and whether or not this superstar athlete is the right fit.

You should also consider the celebrity athlete’s propensity for trouble.  There’s nothing worse than aligning your brand with someone who is going to mar not on his own reputation, but your brand’s as well.  This is one area that you will need to hedge your bets; it may be impossible to completely predict bad behavior that may damage your brand, but by doing some due diligence you can stack the odds more in your favor.

Getting Through the Gatekeepers

It’s highly unlikely that making an attempt to contact a celebrity athlete directly will come to fruition.  Let’s be real here.  Anyone with any celebrity is going to have someone overseeing their social media accounts and handling communication via these outlets. Finding a working email address that is actually going to get you in contact with the athlete is a slim to none proposition.

So, you are going to have to do your homework.  Google searching for a celebrity athlete’s agent can be fruitful for finding the agent’s contact information.  That was the easy part.  Now you have to wade through the various websites that have relationships with the booking agents.  Be prepared to do an initial “pitch” on the product, your company and yourself as succinctly as possible. 

Most of these websites are weeding out the fanatics from serious offers to endorse products.  Can you blame them?   Who doesn’t want to have a personal communication with a famous athlete?  It is key that your initial pitch come across as sincere and legitimate.

Now, if you are lucky you won’t just receive an auto generated reply to your request.  Hopefully you will receive some sort of communication from an actual human being that will view your initial sketch of a proposal with at least mild interest.  You should know that at this point you are still not anywhere near closing the deal, but you are one step closer.

If you are lucky enough to get the agent’s office engaged in some sort of interchange, you now need to get serious about closing the deal.  Keep in mind that these people are busy and they can afford to be discerning, both literally and figuratively. If they perceive that you are wasting their time, they are going to be quick to waste you and your product.

To help ensure that you aren’t “wasted” from the get go, have a plan laid out even before your initial contact.  Your pitch should be somewhat more in depth than the one you used when you filled out the form on the booking agent’s website, but should still be rather concise in nature.  Flesh it out enough to generate interest, but don’t go on and on.  Remember that the people on the other end have plenty to do and probably have more than enough interest in their client.  Make sure to delineate what is needed and wanted from the celebrity in your proposal.

Think you’ve got it made because the booking agent is interested in your pitch so far?  Not quite yet.  You still have the marketing representative or the manager to contend with.  At this point, you will need to have the details of your proposal spelled out and this is where your proposal is going to be scrutinized heavily.  Be sure and spell out as precisely as possible what is being proposed, and when you expect this to happen, and what the compensation may be. 

You also want to indicate whether you expectations are for a short term gig, or a long term relationship.  Keep in mind that the manager or marketing rep may want to keep things on a shorter term basis so that the athlete has the option of taking a better deal when it comes along. 

The Gatekeepers Approve, Now What?

If you have been fortuitous enough to make it through the gatekeepers, now you will have an opportunity to meet the celebrity athlete.  It is important that you maintain a professional relationship with the athlete.  While everyone likes to be admired, there is a way of going about this without looking like you are a gratuitous butt-kisser. 

Feel free to tell the athlete how much you admire his work on the field (or court, or whatever), but don’t forget to tell him how much you admire the charity or community work that he is doing. It’s probably important to him, and mentioning this shows him you are a good guy, too.  You might want to even propose that his charity somehow benefits from your collaboration.

Make sure that you are cognizant of the value of the athlete’s time and don’t waste it.  Spell out your vision for the relationship in simple, yet clear terms and make sure that you are prepared to answer questions. You will want to anticipate what kinds of questions might be asked and be ready with an answer. 

You also want to be prepared to negotiate a little bit, perhaps for more creative input, a percentage of profit or time.  Be willing to be flexible, but realize that you don’t have to promise the sun, moon and stars.  Having a celebrity athlete endorse your product or service is an investment and it comes with some amount of risk on your part.  There is always that chance that what you thought was a brilliant marketing campaign is just not going to produce the return on investment that you hoped/thought it would.

Celebrity athlete endorsement deals can be somewhat tricky and time consuming to navigate.  You can let us help smooth the way and save you time and money by doing so. CelebrityCred.com can help you in securing the right celebrity athlete for your brand.  For more information on navigating the waters of celebrity endorsements, contact CelebrityCred.com at 1(888)359-4521 or visit CelebrityCred.com.