Word: yao
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...Yao won't see a penny from naming or broadcast rights, but if he stays healthy and continues to improve his game, he should one day be rich enough to buy his own arena. In 2001 Yao made Erik Zhang, 28, a University of Chicago M.B.A. student (and a distant cousin by marriage), his official representative. Born in Shanghai, Zhang later moved to Wisconsin with his family. He envisions Yao at the lucrative nexus of American marketing dollars and Chinese consumers. "In five years," predicts Zhang, "he'll be way bigger than Tiger Woods. He'll be global...
...help turn Yao into an elite pitchman, Zhang recruited John Huizinga, deputy dean of faculty at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, sports agent Bill Duffy and a marketing director, Bill Sanders. In September Team Yao, as the group is known, commissioned a Chicago business-school class to prepare a marketing study on Yao. Students traveled to five Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, to conduct extensive polling and focus groups. In December the class presented Team Yao with a 500-page report about the core values of the 400 million urban Chinese consumers on whom they think...
Market research is notoriously pliable, but even before Team Yao started mining the report, companies were at the door. "We chose him because we just thought he was hipper than other people around," says Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who cast Yao opposite Verne (Mini-Me) Troyer in an ad for the firm's new notebook computers. Visa built its Super Bowl ad around Yao's brief English-speaking debut ("Can I write a check?" he asks...
...Team Yao has deals in China with cell-phone and gaming companies, and there is speculation about a global beverage deal. But the biggest haul could come at the end of the season, when Yao's sneaker contract expires. Nike must either negotiate a new deal or see a rival buy the entree that Yao can provide to an estimated 200 million hoops-playing, merchandise-buying Chinese...
...endorsement deals are being structured with an eye toward the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Yao should be reaching his basketball prime just as the world's attention is focused on him and his country. Yao doesn't really care. He just wants to endorse products he actually uses (he has an Apple laptop and says, "I've had Visa for four years") and appear in ads that make him look cool. Otherwise, he says, "I think it's all pretty boring. I'd much rather be playing basketball." --With reporting by Perry Bacon/Washington