LL COOL J GAP Commercial (The ad that made FUBU)
This commercial was pretty much considered genius in the marketing/advertising world. LL Cool J was paid to do a Gap commercial and at the time he was also the offical spokesman for FUBU Clothing. LL not only wore the Fubu hat in this ad but he threw their name in his verse as well. The rest was history for FUBU but what was funny was that GAP's revenue also increased immensely. Basically Gap paid for one of Fubu's biggest ad's in their existence as a clothing brand.Check out an excerpt about the ad from an interview by fourhourworkweek.com with FUBU founder Daymon John.
''One of the most well-known hits we had with LL was during a Gap commercial. He was wearing a pair of Gap jeans and a Gap shirt, but he was somehow able to sport one of our hats during the commercial. Then during his thirty-second freestyle rap, he looks directly into the camera and says, “For Us, By Us, on the low.” No one at Gap nor any of their ad execs thought anything of it. It wasn’t until a month later that someone at the Gap found out, pulled the commercial, and fired a whole bunch of people after they had spent about $30 million running this campaign.
Historically, the Gap commercial is one of the biggest coups known to date in the advertising world. But in Gap’s defense, they were smart enough to realize a year later that, because FUBU had limited distribution, African-Americans, Latinos, and the hip kids of all colors thought that FUBU was actually available at the Gap. So they saw their numbers spike during the LL Cool J campaign. Gap repackaged the same commercial and committed two times the amount of money in advertising that commercial in the following year. If you look back at Gap’s numbers, that was around the time where they had some of their highest returns. ''