Even as an Endorser, DiMaggio Had an Instinct for the Home Run

Joe DiMaggio had been out of baseball for nearly 25 years when he stepped onto Madison Avenue. But with his distinctive voice, handsome face and stylish personality, the Yankee Clipper proved as adept at pitching a product as he was at hitting and catching a baseball.

DiMaggio, who died Monday at age 84, played a lead role with the star-studded New York Yankees from 1936 to 1951. But the celebrated center fielder limited his commercial career to endorsement deals with Mr. Coffee and New York’s former Bowery Savings Bank. Later in life, the Hall of Famer rebuffed products such as hair dye, joking to one hopeful deal maker that he didn’t have any dentures in need of cementing.

Just as DiMaggio knew which pitches he could hit, he knew which products to pitch. Whether praising the savings bank’s security or lauding Mr. Coffee’s brew as the “best I’ve ever tasted,” he hit an advertising home run with consumers.

“He was an athlete who commanded respect instead of just attention,” said Jed Pearsall, president of Performance Research, a Newport, R.I.-based sports marketing consulting firm. “Spokesmen were more trusted than they now are . . . and people believed in his products. Now, though, consumers are cynical enough to know that athletes don’t really care about what they’re endorsing.”

DiMaggio didn’t invent the role of athlete as pitchman. Baseball players had been pitching everything from cigarettes to automobiles. When DiMaggio hooked up with Mr. Coffee and the Bowery bank in the early 1970s, football star Joe Namath was selling pantyhose and Miller Brewing Co. had begun recruiting retired jocks for its memorable “Tastes great, less filling” campaign.

But he’s credited with single-handedly making Mr. Coffee synonymous with coffee makers and helping Bowery defend its New York turf against deep-pocketed competitors. And DiMaggio had an instinct for associating himself with brands consumers could trust.

“Joe DiMaggio could have done all the commercials in the world,” said Mr. Coffee founder and former chairman Vincent Marotta. “But if the product wasn’t any good, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

Seal of Approval

With 10 American League pennants, nine World Series titles and the eye-popping 56-game hitting streak, DiMaggio had secured his reputation with older fans already enamored of the first-generation American who served in the armed forces during World War II. But baseball couldn’t explain the hero worship by consumers too young to have seen him play. His status as living legend, marketers say, was cemented by a highly publicized marriage to Marilyn Monroe, a mention in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and a serendipitous lyric in the movie soundtrack for “The Graduate.”

“Between Miss Monroe and Mrs. Robinson, this guy was instantaneously able to cut through the [advertising world] clutter and grant that instant, Good Housekeeping seal of approval to the coffee maker and the savings bank,” said Martin Blackman, president of a New York-based company that has arranged hundreds of sports-celebrity endorsements.

The retired ballplayer who went on television in 1973 to pitch the new Mr. Coffee machines became Mr. Coffee to many consumers. DiMaggio’s reputation gave the upstart coffee-machine company from Cleveland the credibility needed to challenge percolator makers like General Electric and Proctor-Silex.

The commercials worked because they were believable, Blackman said: “If it had been a vacuum cleaner instead of a coffee maker, no way in the world would consumers accept as fact that Joe DiMaggio vacuums his own living room floor.”

Unlike today’s high-stakes sports marketing game, there were no business agents on hand when Marotta and DiMaggio sat down for lunch at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel early in 1973. Marotta had flown to the West Coast from Cleveland on the spur of the moment to see if DiMaggio would sign on as celebrity spokesman. “I talked and Joe ate,” Marotta recalled. “When I got all finished, lo and behold, he puts up his hand and says, ‘I believe in it.’ I was dumbfounded. I put out my hand and he shook it.”

DiMaggio went into a television studio once a year to produce a half a dozen commercials that ran on network television. Mr. Coffee poured $15 million into the annual advertising campaign. DiMaggio “made more money on Mr. Coffee in a year than he made playing ball,” Marotta said.

The money was well spent. DiMaggio’s on-screen style was decidedly wooden, but the Yankee Clipper won over consumers. “Mr. Coffee became a household word, almost like Hoover,” said Marotta, who sold his Mr. Coffee interest to an investment firm in 1987. It is now owned by Sunbeam.

DiMaggio blended stories about baseball and banking during a 20-year span to deliver the same kind of credibility for Bowery Savings, a long-standing institution that disappeared during the 1990s savings and loan consolidation. “Here’s a New York bank that’s trying to project itself as a classy, secure institution,” Blackman said. “And . . . New York’s supreme guy puts his money in the Bowery. It worked like a charm.”

Protecting the Legend

In today’s advertising world, deceased actors dance in commercials for vacuum cleaners and Babe Ruth’s estate earns more than the star earned while alive. The DiMaggio family undoubtedly will be approached by marketers eager to use his good name to pitch products.

The death of a man who clearly savored his privacy “doesn’t diminish his role in the world or his value . . . to people interested in using his image,” said Mark Roesler, chairman of CMG Worldwide, an Indianapolis-based firm that represents the estates of famous figures like Monroe, Ruth and James Dean. Over the years, DiMaggio’s relationship with Monroe has prompted “lots of interest” among marketers, Roesler said, “but we’ve always been very careful to respect the privacy that Mr. DiMaggio wanted in that regard.”

Blackman is betting that surviving family members will maintain the privacy that the Yankee Clipper enjoyed during life. “If I were DiMaggio’s lawyer, knowing his personality, I wouldn’t allow the use of the name for anything,” Blackman said. “And that’s just going to add to the myth.”