Imagine for a second that you work for a big consumer brand, maybe it's sneakers or fast food or high-end wrist

wrist watches. How do you persuade people that your product is the one worth

buying? No matter how wonderful your sneakers or fast food or watches may be, they are also inanimate objects. They don't have faces.

A watch has a face, but come on you know what I mean. So eventually you may ask

yourself what if I hired a well-known actor or comedian or athlete to endorse my

brand to put a face on it and now potential customers who may not have noticed your brand are going to be like,

ooh, if they like it, maybe I will too.

The practice of Celebrity Endorsement has been around for a long time In the 1760s, the English pottery

entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood created one of the first luxury brands after receiving an endorsement

from the Queen. In ancient Greece, some of civilization's earliest coins

had images of gods and goddesses like Athena. Who better to endorse a new product like money, which you might otherwise be suspicious of?

But what happens if you attach a celebrity to your product and that celebrity messes up.

Police believe that

that O.J Simpson is in that car.

We've received a report of a gun in the car.

The vehicle is registered to Al-Calling, a former teammate,

close friend of O.J. Simpson's, who has been a fugitive from justice now, almost 12 hours.

O.J. Simpson is just one example of many. Today on Freakonomics radio a case study of another endorsement deal that went terribly

wrong. I mean this is not just a mistake this is a

crime and this is something horrible. So what happens then? We will try to answer that

question starting now.

This is Freakanomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything

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