LeBron James has signed a major promotional deal with Microsoft, the King's sports marketing company accounced today. It's just a little tiny note buried at the end of this Brian Windhorst column in the Beacon Journal (about LeBron's increasing fatigue, which is probably worthy of a post of its own), but I think it's interesting. There's no mention of exactly what product LeBron will be endorsing, and for all I know, it could be pretty standard athlete fair; something like an XBox game, or the new Microsoft Zune mp3 player. A little more intriguing, though, is the notion that maybe Microsoft brought LeBron in to pimp Windows Vista, the new operating system that will be available in late January. Or maybe they'll use him to sort of counteract the "Hello, I'm a Mac" commercials and sort of round out the staid corporate image generally associated with Microsoft.
I'm curious about it, though. Maybe Microsoft feels like LeBron has that Tiger-like appeal that's not limited to people that are similar to him in age, demographic, interests and shade. Maybe LeBron's got the juice now to sell operating systems to middle management. Maybe LeBron's cool tops the understated elitism of the "Hi, I'm a Mac" guy.
Though, you have to wonder. If the last two days here in the NBA FanHouse have proven anything, it's that there's a large percentage of the population out there who believes that the NBA is a collection of street thugs who can't read or function in society without punching other people in the face.
I'm interested to see how he fits in the Microsoft system.
Comments (Page 1 of 1)
No one, including LeBron, will ever be as cool as John Hodgman!
I hope he does the commercial in his Old Guy Lebron character..."that's what you call a quadruple double, boy."
This I'll have to see. I just don't get the connection between King James and Microsoft...but hey, they must be pretty smart and know what they're doing.
lebron is very unique i think he will attact alot of customers and he's way better than that John Hodgman guy