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Essay on Endorsements by Professional Athletes
Companies quite often use the name, likeness, or image of professional athletes for their marketing campaigns. Such corporate sponsorships for athletes, generally called endorsements, easily can exceed $100,000 per year. Coaches also may be used for corporate marketing campaigns as they fall under the purview of endorsement contracts for professional athletes. Representation of professional athletes for these sponsorship contracts creates many unique legal issues, inasmuch as the athlete may need to comply with league and team rules in addition to following general business precepts.
Before seeking any sponsorship, an athlete or his or her advisor should be familiar with the athlete's team and league endorsement guidelines. Examples of guidelines that may cause unexpected problems include conflict of interest rules between team and individual sponsors, and violations of regulations regarding specific advertising activities. Olympic athletes have many more restrictions on the corporate endorsements they may accept because technically they are considered amateur athletes.
Individual athletes those who aren't on a team also got their due. In 2002, tennis star Venus Williams signed a reported five-year, “$40 million deal with Reebok” (Web 1), which would be the richest endorsement contract for a female athlete. Anna Kournikova has appeared in Charles Schwab ads. "The endorsement market, relative to the other crashes in the economy, has been relatively brisk,” (Graham, 2001).Compared to the drastic drops in the stock market and the overall drop in advertising which suffered the biggest hit we've had in recent times the endorsement market has been relatively unscathed.
If a company has a limited budget for advertising, he said, it wants to make sure it makes a big splash by using a big name. There are always positioning statements that say a product is the best at something. Somewhere inside the reason a person should buy the product is `It's the best at something.' Athletes articulate `best ness' or quality..........
