A New Set of Ground Rules

No longer can there be doubt about where Joe DiMaggio has gone. Dude has pulled on some gloves, tugged at a warm hat, strapped his feet onto a snowboard and is now shredding on a powder-laced mountain.

In a sign of the mainstreaming of snowboarding, which only a few years ago was a sport seemingly restricted to teenage lunatics who reveled in a buzz-off attitude, Chris Klug, 30, the U.S. snowboarder who won a bronze medal at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, recently began starring in advertisements for Mr. Coffee.

DiMaggio, the late New York Yankee star idealized in Simon & Garfunkel’s song “Mrs. Robinson” in the 1960s, was for many years Mr. Coffee’s pitchman. Now the torch -- not the Olympic torch, the iconographic one -- has been passed, from baseball legend ... to snowboarder.

As Tina Basich, one of snowboarding’s most recognizable female riders, put it, “That’s crazy,” which is snowboard-speak for “excellent.”

Klug, who survived a liver transplant and is given to keeping matters in perspective, said, “It’s pretty cool.”

Other snowboarders have also signed on in recent months for national ad work.

Observed David Carter, who teaches a class on sports business at USC and is co-author of a forthcoming book on the subject, “In each generation, you have athletes who not only transcended their sport but helped transcend sports and business,” stars such as football quarterback Joe Namath and golfer Jack Nicklaus.

“Snowboarding,” Carter said, “has clearly reached that level now.”

The Mr. Coffee campaign illustrates how America has changed over the past few years. For one thing, it is appearing in magazines such as People and InStyle and online and not, like DiMaggio’s advertisements, on television because, a company official said, the broadcast landscape is too fragmented today. More significantly, it illustrates the way America plays, and the players it listens to.

DiMaggio died in 1999, at age 84. In his day, he was -- at least in public -- the undisputed embodiment of class and grace.

In 1974, 23 years after he retired from baseball, he became spokesman for Mr. Coffee.

The brand was introduced in 1972 and, with DiMaggio’s endorsement, quickly came to dominate the category it invented -- the automatic drip coffee maker.

Now roughly one of every three households in the U.S. that has an automatic drip coffee maker has a Mr. Coffee.

This year Mr. Coffee -- now part of the empire owned by Boca Raton, Fla.-based Sunbeam Products, Inc. -- turned 30. “The brand turning the big 3-0, we need to turn and be agile and address [consumers’] changing needs,” said Mary Ann Knaus, vice president and general manager for global appliances.

The concern: The average Mr. Coffee buyer is between 45 and 55. The brand wanted to execute a two-fer -- to retain older buyers by emphasizing what Knaus called Mr. Coffee’s “heritage, quality, all-American feel” even as it attracted more younger buyers, particularly those 35 to 45, who, as she put it, had “changing consumption patterns,” in essence the choice of a Starbucks on seemingly every corner.

Like all marketing types, the executives at Sunbeam could read the numbers that for the past few years have been coming out of the Mt. Prospect, Ill., headquarters of the National Sporting Goods Assn.:

From 1996 through 2001, for example, participation among boys 7 to 17 in skateboarding jumped 123%, from 3 million to 6.7 million; participation in snowboarding, which is decidedly more expensive than skateboarding, nonetheless rose from 1.3 million to 1.9 million boys, up 46%.

In the same span, golf participation increased 26% from 2.3 million to 2.9 million, football 2% from 4.6 million to 4.7 million. Baseball participation was flat at 7 million. Basketball dropped 9% from 9.6 to 8.7 million.

Snowboarding’s rise in popularity helped boost the ski industry, which by the mid-1990s had stagnated. Nationally, snowboarders make up about half of the people on the slopes on a given day.

Snowboarding’s first run in the Olympics came in 1998, in Nagano, Japan. It was marred when Ross Rebagliati of Canada, the men’s slalom winner, was temporarily stripped of his gold medal after testing positive for marijuana, which he blamed on second-hand smoke.

He ultimately got to keep the medal but the PR damage lingered -- until this past February at the Salt Lake Games, where everything went right, particularly for the U.S. team, and snowboarding, broadcast nationwide on NBC, was stamped with mainstream legitimacy.

First, Kelly Clark of the United States won the women’s halfpipe event. The next day, American men turned a triple play -- Ross Powers, Danny Kass and Jarret [J.J.] Thomas going 1-2-3 in the men’s halfpipe.

Four days after that, Klug, who had to fix a broken buckle on his boot with duct tape before his final race, won bronze in the parallel giant slalom. Any medal, as he and doctors said at the time, was unlikely; in July 2000, suffering from the same liver disease that had killed Chicago Bear running back Walter Payton in 1999, Klug underwent a transplant.

Klug had been on a waiting list for years. He did not receive any special treatment just because, for instance, he had finished sixth in the Olympic slalom in Nagano.

Earnest, well-spoken, close to his family, a star quarterback in high school, he was a marketer’s dream. And big business was suddenly interested in snowboarding.

After the Games, snowboarding could be seen anew as the very definition of “leading edge,” explained Marc Rappin, a senior vice president at the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency in New York.

But not too leading edge: “Because it’s part of the Olympics and because of the quality of the athletes who participated in the last Olympics, it is contemporary, leading edge, on the vanguard without being too far out there and too untouchable for mainstream America,” Rappin said.

Within weeks after the Games, Powers, Kass and Thomas were signed to appear in a national TV ad -- the first national TV campaign featuring Olympic snowboarders -- for a tea company. Which one? As Powers put it in response to a question in the December issue of Transworld Snowboarding magazine, “Nestea, dude.”

After DiMaggio, Mr. Coffee had its pick of the sports celebrity endorsers. Why not someone like Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre, a certain Hall of Famer? Or Lakers Shaquille O’Neal or Kobe Bryant? Or baseball’s Mark McGwire?

Because, according to Rappin, the advertising executive who supervised execution of the Mr. Coffee campaign, “If we were to use Mark McGwire, he would just become the newer model of Joe DiMaggio -- not the more innovative model of Joe DiMaggio.”

Rick Burton, director of the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, said, “It’s like the TV show ‘Friends,’ where everybody is permanently 29 years old, where everybody is drinking coffee and having a fulfilled life.

“Even though they say they’re targeting 35 to 45, I think they’re really trying to re-invent themselves and target 15 to 35. That’s where the next demographic bubble is. The baby boomers are dying. The next generation with disposable income is Generation Y, and the Generation Y icons and heroes are more likely to be snowboarders and skateboarders than baseball players.”

Klug said the Mr. Coffee campaign -- also featured is MTV’s Carson Daly -- “is so much fun.” He added, “I’ve had so many wonderful opportunities since the Olympics. It’s a great ride.”