Applying an Advertising Creativity Model to the NFL’s Black Quarterbacks and Postmodern Sport Marketing Practices

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Black quarterback’s emergence in the National Football League as a modern superstar and celebrity endorser in light of the theoretical framework of advertising creativity proposed by [@R49]. These authors suggested that creativity existed around the concepts of divergence and relevance, while proposing further examination of the theory in five primary areas: advertising as a communication process, management process, societal process, group process, and personal process. This paper will apply historical investigations; discussions of images, perceptions, and racial discourses; and modern sport marketing practices to the five prongs of the creativity framework to present an exploratory analysis of divergence and relevance related to the Black NFL quarterback’s postmodern status as the new sport marketing icon and discuss him in terms of divergence and relevance for each of the model’s prongs. This work fills a gap in the sport marketing discipline and addresses a call for future research described by [@R11] by connecting theories of social sciences and epistemology of consumer sciences to sport marketing research through application of theoretical concepts and models from broader areas of psychology and consumer behavior to the evolving cognate of sport advertising.