Beats Bags Superstar Trio – LeBron James, Lionel Messi, and Shohei Ohtani – for New Launch
In what the Beats team is calling a “truly iconic campaign”, three of the world’s most celebrated sports personalities have been brought together by the Apple-owned company.
The campaign is called “Listen to Your Heart,” and is all about the new heart-rate monitor sported in the Powerbeats Pro 2 and is narrated by hip-hop star RZA. But it is the trio of stars that is causing a stir, not least because they all have huge promo deals with other companies.
“We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to say we’ve got to make this a truly iconic campaign, something worthy of the product,” Beats CMO Chris Thorne said in an interview. “At Beats we’re always trying to do something unexpected, we’re also trying to do things that haven’t been done, even in marketing… all three of those guys have different shoe company deals. How many brands could actually bring them together in this way? I think Beats is one of the only ones able to do that. I think it was amazing we were able to pull it off.”
This is also a campaign with truly global reach as each of the stars comes from three different countries – the US, Argentina and Japan. However, Thorne said that there is a balance to be had as stellar names like these can eclipse the product. He insists: “…the product is the hero in it, along with the talent.”
Messi signed his deal with Beats in July last year, but the financial details of the deal haven’t been made public. Messi was top of SportsPro’s 2023 list of the world’s 50 Most Marketable Athletes. His deal follows a ten-year, US$2.5 billion global broadcast partnership between Apple and Major League Soccer (MLS), which was signed in 2022.
