Baseball's Joe Dimaggio Was Champion Pitchman

BELIEVABILITY and integrity are credited as keys to his successful career as a product spokesman after his retirement from the sport.

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 hitting and catching a baseball.

DiMaggio, whose lead role with the New York Yankees ended in 1951, 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 - joking to one hopeful deal maker that he didn't have any dentures in need of cementing.

Just as DiMaggio, who died Monday, knew which pitches he could hit, and 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 was a hit 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 company. "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, who hooked up with Mr. Coffee and the Bowery bank in the early 1970s, didn't invent the role of athlete-as-salesman. Baseball players had been pushing everything from cigarettes to automobiles. But he is 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."

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."

DiMaggio's Mr. Coffee commercials worked because they were believable, said Martin Blackman, president of a New York-based company that has arranged hundreds of sports-celebrity endorsements.

"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," Blackman said.

Unlike today's high-stakes sports-marketing game, there were no business agents when Marotta and DiMaggio had lunch at a San Francisco hotel early in 1973. Marotta had flown from Cleveland 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 to produce a half-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.