James and I were laughing about the excessive hype that has surrounded Bode Miller, the faltering American skier, and got into a good conversation about behind-the-scenes commercialization of various Olympic personality types. When humble, dogged, amateur-style athletes prevail over the high-exposure, corporate-style athletes, marketers don’t think they have as much to work with, so often stick with an Olympic failure if their image investment still solves the demographic equation.\n<\/p>\n
Dale Earnhardt’s attitude that a second-place finisher is just the “first loser” may resonate strongly with most gold-medal contenders, but the world of celebrity endorsement is different, and always will be driven more by overall persona than actual competitive results. That’s why you can expect advertising executives to be much more attracted to a cute snowboarder<\/a>‘s impulsive screw-up than a veteran skier<\/a>‘s credo of Olympic longevity—\n<\/p>\n “Spend a lot time on the hill, spend time training, and then, if you work hard over a long period of time, with a lot of focus, good things will happen to you in the end, and… use your head while you’re having fun.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" James and I were laughing about the excessive hype that has surrounded Bode Miller, the faltering American skier, and got into a good conversation about behind-the-scenes commercialization of various Olympic personality types. When humble, dogged, amateur-style athletes prevail over the high-exposure, corporate-style athletes, marketers don’t think they have as much to work with, so often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,46,18,62,16,6,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n