Kobe Bryant, the influencer
Kobe Bryant (Shutterstock)
Just over a week ago, on Sunday night, we learned of the death of Kobe Bryant. He had been killed alongside his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others in a helicopter crash.
In basketball, the sport Bryant excelled at for two decades, players, coaches and fans mourned his passing. But it went beyond that. Not only was Bryant a sporting legend, a great of the game he chose to play, but he was an off-court icon who made millions from, and for, a number of brands.
Like Michael Jordan at the start of Bryant’s career and LeBron James towards the end of it, the former LA Lakers player was a brand in and of himself — an NBA MVP who enshrined his jersey number, 24, in history. He was associated with some of the world’s biggest companies, and won an Oscar for a short animated film on his love of basketball. He even created a comic-book nickname for himself — Black Mamba. Yes, the Kobe Bryant story was about shooting hoops, but it was about so much more.
On this side of the Atlantic, sports stars sign sponsorship deals and engage in corporate tie-ups. But with US players, like Kobe Bryant, it goes to a different level. They don’t just work with brands, they become brands. In this age, when everyone wants to be an “influencer”, it is worth reflecting that Bryant was doing it years before it had a name. These were not people who were famous for being famous, they were elite athletes operating at the top of their game.
While this brings riches, it also brings controversy. For instance, Colin Kaepernick, the American football star, led the on-field protest where players went down on one knee during the national anthem, which is played at the start of each game. The intention was to highlight police racism and brutality. The attention lifted Kaepernick to international fame — and also to the attention of Nike, which put him in one of its adverts. Many people boycotted the firm.
Plenty of others, it should be noted, were drawn towards Nike and Kaepernick’s presence put the sportswear giant right at the heart of a debate that was sweeping America. In particular, a number of younger customers who wanted to show their support for Kaepernick and his cause bought Nike products.
Controversy of a more disturbing kind courted Bryant. He was accused of sexual assault in 2003, a case that was eventually settled out of court after charges were dropped. He had just moved from being associated with one sportswear giant, Adidas, to another, Nike. He did not feature in an advert for his new sponsor for two years.
Even in these increasingly image-conscious times, American sports are dominated by advertising and sponsorship far more than in the UK. Perhaps it is down to the stop-start nature of most of their big sports, that this allows more adverts to be screened. Perhaps it is something else, but the difference is obvious to anyone who watches sports in both countries.
The biggest amalgamation of sport and advertising comes courtesy not of basketball but the Super Bowl, the climax of the American football season. It is self-consciously as much a media and advertising event as it is a sporting one. Sunday night’s clash between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers was no exception.
While Premier League football advertising mostly consists of spots from gambling firms and takeaway food services, some of the world’s biggest firms ran clips featuring some of the world’s biggest stars during Super Bowl (a 30-second ad will cost you $5.6 million). There was an Amazon ad featuring Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia De Rossi, one from web-hosting firm SquareSpace starring Winona Ryder, and other spots from Google, Budweiser and more. It was largely very safe, family-friendly viewing.
Kobe Bryant was one of those at the summit of the mountain of advertising dollars in US sport, thanks to raw talent and sheer hard work. As the author Benjamin Markovits put it for the Times Literary Supplement:
“Bryant though was a league almost of one. You suspect he would have been good at almost anything he tried, and that anything he tried would have had this faint sheen of self-perfectionism.”
Unlike the influencers of today, his reach will live on for decades to come.
