Wheaties Sparkle Dims For Sports Stars

May 23, 1999|By The Wall Street Journal.

Denver Broncos running back Terrell Davis got an offer this year that American athletes have coveted since the days when football helmets were made out of leather and nobody had heard of artificial turf.

Win the Super Bowl, said General Mills Inc., and we'll put you and some teammates on a Wheaties box.

His response: Thanks, but no thanks.

After 75 years, a marketing phenomenon that has had renowned athletes vying for a nod from the Minneapolis cereal giant is losing its allure with the stars. Today, athletes from baseball's Ken Griffey Jr. to golfer Tiger Woods are treating the Breakfast of Champions more like a cold bowl of porridge, demanding more money or refusing to make personal appearances.

Some force the company to include additional sponsors in the cover photos. Davis turned down his offer in part because the company wouldn't promise him a box of his own someday.

It's not as if General Mills is hurting for famous faces. In the past 18 months, the company has signed deals with Woods, Michael Jordan, Mark McGwire and Muhammad Ali. And some athletes still accept Wheaties deals without negotiation. "Brett didn't care about the money," says Joe Sweeney of SMG in Milwaukee, who handles endorsements for Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre.

But Favre's attitude, once the norm among big stars, is now the exception. Tevester Scott, chief operating officer of No Limit Enterprises, the entertainment and sports agency founded by rap mogul Master P, says he can't imagine advising his clients to appear on a Wheaties box simply because it's an honor. "They'd look at me like I was crazy," he says. And what do they want? "Show me the money," he says.

Wheaties isn't what it used to be. Its share of the cereal market has declined from a peak of 12 percent a few decades ago to about 1 percent.

The cereal is also the casualty of an inflated sports economy. General Mills offers athletes far less than industry norms. Davis, for example, would have received less than $1,000 for his appearance on the Broncos box; Olympic skater Tara Lipinski agreed to an offer of about $15,000 for a solo cover after the 1998 Winter Games--although the company chose not to use her.

"Because there's a status attached to Wheaties, the company has bought and retained talent at a fraction of what other advertisers have paid," says Nova Lanktree, a Chicago sports-marketing expert. She adds: "Wheaties has been very spoiled."

Meantime, rival Kellogg Co. of Battle Creek, Mich., has stepped up its sports-marketing efforts, signing potential Wheaties endorsers like Nascar driver Jeff Gordon and basketball stars Grant Hill and Sheryl Swoopes--often for considerably more money than Wheaties pays.

General Mills spokesman Greg Zimprich acknowledges that modern jocks have much more lucrative endorsement options. "We recognize the sports-marketing landscape has changed," he says.

The result: a series of concessions to athletes. According to officials at IMG, the sports agency that represents Woods, the golfer initially turned down a chance to be on the familiar orange box--then demanded that General Mills pay him more money than it paid Michael Jordan (about $400,000 a year for the golfer), promote his charitable foundation on the box, sponsor a promotion for Titleist golf balls and use pictures of him displaying both his Nike clothes and his Rolex watch. He also declined to sign boxes at personal appearances. The company acceded to all that, IMG officials say, but in the end Woods agreed to the deal mainly because his father considered it an honor.

Griffey, the Seattle Mariners outfielder who once endorsed Kellogg cereals, talked General Mills into a rare eight-year contract valued at a total of about $1 million. The fee was so low compared with his other endorsements that the company agreed to limit his personal appearances on its behalf to about four hours a year. "Junior has a lot of demands on his time," explains Brian Goldberg, Griffey's agent.

But General Mills can only be pushed so far. When the Broncos' Davis demanded that the company either change its planned box design to give him equal billing with team quarterback John Elway or present him with a cover of his own in the future, the company scuttled the entire deal and destroyed thousands of boxes it had already printed.