It wasn’t a quick path to the Super Bowl for Foot Locker, the athletic footwear retailer started by Woolworth Co.’s Kinney Shoes in California in 1974. Competition from the likes of Macy’s and J.C. Penney cooled initial growth when Foot Locker was still a regional chain. Then the Sawdon & Bess unit of Ted Bates Worldwide, its agency from the start, decided that “the men in the striped shirts” could close a sale with most shoppers “who crossed the lease line,” Paul Barrett, then senior VP at the agency, told Ad Age years later. “Our challenge was to convince prospective buyers to travel 20 to 30 minutes to a retail mall and Foot Locker,” Barrett said.
That achieved, retail sales hit $100 million in the 1980s and Foot Locker entered enough markets to go national with its advertising. “Together the client and the agency agreed to develop a high-impact, national program that would preemptively establish Foot Locker as the No. 1 athletic footwear store,” Barrett said.
The goal was actually twofold: Sales associates didn’t yet feel part of a national brand, recalled Martin Mitchell, then exec VP at Sawdon & Bess. The client asked, “What kind of crazy thing could you do to make us feel like we’re all in?” he said.
Mitchell argued for a Super Bowl ad, but not during game-play. He thought viewers would be most dialed-in right before kickoff. In April 1986, nine months before the 1987 game, he bought that position. “Budweiser spent the whole year trying to knock me out of that slot,” he said.
The team, meanwhile, came up with an ambitious creative execution to put a stake in the ground that would last. It worked. “It was a wonderful moment in the advertising business, and you have a few in your life,” Mitchell said.
Foot Locker did not return to the game. “They wanted to spread the money out throughout the whole television budget,” Mitchell said. “Then we did a whole bunch of television spots. Plus they had achieved what they wanted to do.”
Other Super Bowl spots to visit space include Hyatt's "Hotel in Space" in 1985, "Moon Office" for FedEx in 2007 and "Avocados in Space" for Avocados From Mexico in 2016.
Woolworth senior VP-advertising and communications: Jack Aneser.
Director: Graham Henman. Production company: HKM. Producer: Tom Mickel.
Sawdon & Bess president: Jerome Bess. Senior VP-group creative director, art: Jan Rehder. Senior VP-group creative director, copy: Karl “Ding” Koehler. Agency producer: Claire Ward-Hughes. Exec VP-general manager: Martin Mitchell. Senior VP-group management supervisor: Paul Stryker Barrett. Senior VP-TV production: Jeff Brown. Senior VP-media director: John Prendergast. Music: Elias & Associates.
BRAND: Foot Locker
YEAR: 1987
AGENCY: Sawdon & Bess
SUPERBOWL: XXI
QUARTER AIRED: pre-kick