Forget Olympic medals and records; which athlete will win the most deals from the 2012 Games?
Now that the athletic portion of the 2012 Olympic Games is over, the real competition begins. Who will bag the most endorsements?
You could put your money on Gabby Douglas, the gold-medal winning gymnast with the 100-megawatt smile. Plenty of companies are---Kellogg's Corn Flakes signed her to a $90-million-plus contract, and she's said to be up for 30 other deals worth about $2.4 million each.
Our David T. Jones is behind Usain Bolt, the Jamaican flash who's won six gold medals in the sprints and set record after record along the way. It's a good bet---Bolt entered the 2012 Games as the world's highest-paid track-and-field athlete, earning more than $20 million a year from brands such as Puma, Visa, Nissan and those fancy Hublot watches.
Bolt's watch-busting performances at the London Olympics are sure to attract even more big brands—and inevitably, some also-rans too. A startup in the U.K. has just asked Bolt to endorse them in return for a lifetime supply of Chicken McNuggets. And David has uncovered a few other strange deals lobbed at Usain as well.
Check them out after the jump.
David T. Jones is the creator of Ad Land and chief creative officer at Third Street, an "attention agency" that he co-founded in 2009 after a long career at FCB Chicago. Ad Land has been featured in AdWeek magazine, beaucoup blogs and the book, The Creative Process Illustrated. Follow David on Twitter.
