Agency Spy

David Beckham is a stand out case of where a touch of the magic celebrity dust can make your brand come to life. Merchandise sales for Beckham’s new US team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, are up 700% for the team and 300% league-wide as a direct result of Beckham, according to MLS, New York. The brand Herbalife runs across the Galaxy’s jerseys, which has resulted in fans asking what the brand is and does.

Greg Probert, president and COO at Herbalife, “We had about 900 million media impressions in a two-week period around when Beckham and the new team jerseys were first introduced in mid-July. Now people are coming up to them and asking, ‘What’s Herbalife?’”

Beckham will also be featured in range of new commercials for Adidas as well as Pepsi and his own fragrance line. Sports, unlike the retail industry, has often done well with celebrity endorsements. Any one remember Nike’s Air Jordan’s? They’re still riding as one of the best selling sneaker brands worldwide. We’d argue that celeb product pushing works best when the message is communicating positive emotions: hope, love, courage, strength. It’s also credible to think that Beckham actually might use Herbalife and obviously, he wears Adidas. It’s a little harder to think that Mary J. Blige is actually shopping at The Gap.

Ps. We love the well done Adidas ads featuring Beckham (see above) that’s racked up over 500,000 views (multiple postings) on YouTube in the past five months. So well done and smart and there’s that positive emotion thing again…

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