Apple's Beats signs 15 college athletes to endorsement deals

In its largest single endorsement investment in college football players to date, Apple's Beats by Dre will now pay a range of athletes to wear its products.

Beats is no stranger to sports endorsement, for instance with a slew of NBA players promoting Powerbeats Pro in Apple's "NBA Unleased" ad. It's also benefited from sports stars "accidentally" seen wearing unannounced devices, such as LeBron James with Beats Studio Buds before they were released.

According to Bloomberg, however, these individual deals have now been followed by a mass signing of 15 college players.

The players include USC's quarterback Caleb Williams, University of Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers and Alabama cornerback Ga'Quincy 'Kool-Aid' McKinstry.

"As we've worked with our initial college athletes, we've realized how important it is for them to have brand support at that level," said Aminah Charles, Beats' head of sports marketing. "The industry is moving toward truly empowering college athletes, so we wanted to take a bigger swing in this area."

CBS has now released the full list of players signed by Beats:

Caleb Williams, QB, USC
Quinn Ewers, QB, Texas
JJ McCarthy, QB, Michigan
Cade Klubnik, QB, Clemson
DJ Uiagalelei, QB, Oregon State
Jalen Milroe, QB, Alabama
Jayden Daniels, QB, LSU
Joe Milton lll, QB, Tennessee
Jordan Travis, QB, Florida State
Kool-Aid McKinstry, DB, Alabama
Malaki Starks, DB, Georgia
Michael Penix Jr., QB, Washington
Nick Singleton, RB, Penn State
Sam Hartman, QB, Notre Dame
Shedeur Sanders, QB, Colorado

Beats's Charles says that this series of deals is just the start. "[This] will be an annual list and we look forward to keeping an eye out for the next generation"

Details of the deals and what Beats devices may be promoted have not been disclosed. However, most recently the company released its Beats Studio Pro, which is a lower-cost rival to Apple's own AirPods Max.

4 Comments

mknelson 1147 comments · 9 Years

About 1 year ago

lmasanti said:

quote: “However, most recently the company released its Beats Studio Pro, which is a lower-cost rival to Apple's own AirPods Max.”

Zillions of companies have ‘two tier brands’ —I just remember Omega and Tissot—… just to expand marketshare… not to ‘rival’ with the base brand.

(But remember… showing that Apple is making something bad… brings page views!)

That's the last line of the article, not the lead. I believe the point William Gallagher is making based on the first sentence of that paragraph is that the Beats Studio Pro is the most likely Beats device to be part of the promotion.

I don't even think I'd call Beats a second tier as such. Beats is marketed to the athletic/music market and fans as opposed to the AirPods focus on the nerd/general consumer market.

Take the Beats Fit Pro - you could argue that they are a lower cost Airpods Pro, but the earpiece fit designed for sports more than compensates for the lack of wireless charging and that's the only real difference with the bonus of a slightly lower price.

FileMakerFeller 1561 comments · 6 Years

About 1 year ago

AppleInsider said:

"As we've worked with our initial college athletes, we've realized how important it is for them to have brand support at that level," said Aminah Charles, Beats' head of sports marketing. "The industry is moving toward ~~truly empowering~~ more fully exploiting college athletes, so we wanted to take a bigger swing in this area."
Read on AppleInsider

ftfy

neoncat 164 comments · 5 Years

About 1 year ago

FileMakerFeller said:

AppleInsider said:

"As we've worked with our initial college athletes, we've realized how important it is for them to have brand support at that level," said Aminah Charles, Beats' head of sports marketing. "The industry is moving toward ~~truly empowering~~ more fully exploiting college athletes, so we wanted to take a bigger swing in this area."
Read on AppleInsider

ftfy

College football, as a whole, is a corrupt dumpster fire of toxicity masquerading under eye-rolling proclamations of nobility, but I question how NIL serves to further exploitation? If anything, it tilts the scale toward the athletes who, yes, have always been chattel shamelessly exploited to line the pockets of university administrators who conveniently look the other way in the face of the sport's gross excesses. We would agree that NIL fixes nothing that is fatally wrong with college football, but I absolutely love the idea of a stand-out college athlete walking away from that miserable experience having been paid more than their masters. To me, it's a bad system used against itself and that's delicious.