Sports and Brands: athlete endorsements

I guess I could have spoken of the larger topic of celebrity endorsements, but simply because I love and live sports I am narrowing it down to just athlete endorsements.

Just to get you on the right track, Tiger Woods made $87,000,000 in endorsements in 2005 alone. As a comparison he only made $10 million in actual winnings. $10 million is a lot of money, but he is making 8.7 times that just from doing advertisements and promotions.

You don't have to even be that great of an athlete to get endorsements. Andre Agassi, who was great at one time, but only earned about $1 million from actual winnings in 2005. He can not win much at all in tennis, but I doubt he's too worried, considering he is making $25 million from endorsements.

The endorsements used to be all sports related or apparel related. Now athletes endorse everything. For all of you Boston sports fans, I have a great example. Adam Vinatieri, during his stay in New England, endorsed absolutely everything. He did commercials for restaurants, furniture stores, credit cards, cars, pizza, and everything else they would pay him to do. He kept getting deals and he was a kicker. He was a great kicker, but he was a kicker nonetheless.
He changed teams in the offseason, so all the local endorsements he did became obsolete.

That brings up the issue of athletes being unreliable. Athletes constantly change teams, get injured, get worse, do stupid things, and get in trouble. It happens with all celebrity endorsers, I guess, but it seems to happen more with athletes. Kobe Bryant was a great example. He got accused of rape and 10 of the 20 different companies he was endorsing dropped him as their spokesman. He was found not guilty, but the companies still lost money and tarnished their brand image by being involved with him. Athletes can hurt brand images greatly, but companies take those risks anyways. It's because there is so much awareness and respect for athletes.

If you had your own company with a strong brand, would you use an athlete to endorse it? I know, as much as I love and know sports, I would think twice.

Daniil