SoloStove, The Olympics, and Snoop Dogg: How to Make Celebrity Endorsements Work

When the 2024 Paris Olympics concluded earlier this month, there were a few obvious winners:
Simone Biles for chiseling her name in stone as the all-time gymnastics GOAT.
France for overperforming in pretty much everything from basketball to swimming to opening ceremony originality in their hometown Olympics.
And, Snoop Dogg for bringing a breath of fresh air to NBC’s somewhat tired and stuffy coverage of the games.

The biggest winner? Snoop (duh). At least that’s how we see it as ad peeps. The dude was everywhere. Everyone loved it. It was a gamble, and it worked.

But why? Why was the Snoop Dogg partnership so successful for a network that’s struggled to leverage the world’s largest athletic event for years?

Previous Adventures in Snoop-ification: The SoloStove Debacle
To understand why NBC and the Olympics were successful, let’s first flashback to 2023 and SoloStove/Snoop Dogg’s “smoke” promotion that…went up in flames.

In case you didn’t know, SoloStove invested a good chunk of change in a partnership with Snoop, in which he “gave up smoke.” Of course, no one believed Snoop would ever give up one of his essential character-defining habits, so instead, the campaign relied on a less-than-clever pun referring to the smokeless feature of a SoloStove. It should have been a big hit, right? Not so much: the CEO was fired just weeks after the stunt fell flat with little to no discernible sales impact.

SoloStove tried to take a one-note joke with a hyper-relevant to Snoop, and turn it into a sales campaign…which hardly ever works. Now, since we started writing this blog, SoloStove has rekindled its efforts with Snoop with some “blunt” marketing. And while the jury is out, the headline here is it can be hard to build an impactful campaign around a joke relevant to one celebrity.

Why NBC’s Play Worked
So if SoloStove missed the mark, how’d NBC get it right? There are a few key reasons:

1. NBC let Snoop experience the Olympics with genuine curiosity and connectedness, then shared that Snoop-erience directly with us. It felt natural and relatable – we all wanted to hang with Snoop at the games to keep events like dressage not just watchable, but hilarious.
2. Snoop wasn’t selling anything–he was truly there to just provide content in his voice and personality, which is a lot more natural than asking a celebrity to endorse a product they’d never be caught dead using (see also: Tiger Woods for Buick).
3. The partnership was mutually beneficial–Snoop’s hosting a show on NBC, so him going “viral” with the Peacock logo on the screen is a win-win for the station and something he cares about.
4. Last but not least, NBC took a gamble – yes Snoop is wildly popular, but is he universally popular across all those varied NBC demographics? Turns out, yeah, he kind of is. And taking the approach of “maybe grandma will like what their kids like”–instead of overthinking who it might offend–totally worked.Celebrity partnerships aren’t a bad idea. But they aren’t always a great idea either. As long as everyone from the CEO to the celeb endorser is on the same page as to what the end goal is and why this partnership makes sense, they can (and oftentimes do) work.Not to mention, it’s helpful to be raking in over a billion dollars in ad sales from the event itself…it certainly makes it a little easier to sleep at night if not everything is a home run.