Bo Knows

"Bo Knows" was an advertising campaign for Nike cross-training shoes that ran in 1989 and 1990 and featured professional baseball and American football player Bo Jackson.

Jackson was the first athlete in the modern era to play professional baseball and football in the same year. He was the perfect spokesman for a shoe geared toward an athlete actively engaged in more than one sport at a time or with little time between activities to switch to sport-specific footwear.

The original ad

The original "Bo Knows" ad was a television commercial by firm Wieden & Kennedy. The spot opens with a picture of Jackson playing baseball and fellow ballplayer Kirk Gibson saying, "Bo knows baseball." The next scene shows Jackson on the gridiron, with quarterback Jim Everett explaining, "Bo knows football." Jackson then plays basketball, tennis and ice hockey and goes running, with Michael Jordan, John McEnroe, and Mary Decker vouching for Jackson's knowledge of their sports. (Wayne Gretzky, when confronted with Jackson laying a body check, simply says "No.") The ad concludes with Jackson trying to play the guitar, whereupon blues legend Bo Diddley says, "Bo, you don't know diddley." Serendipitously, the spot first aired during the commercial break immediately following Jackson's lead-off home run in the 1989 Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

ubsequent ads

Later "Bo Knows" ads had Jackson trying his hand at cycling, soccer, cricket, surfing, weightlifting, auto racing and, as a jockey, horse racing.

In one version of the commercial, after Jackson is shown trying several activities, a confused Sonny Bono walks into the shot and says (playing off the tag line), "I thought this was another Bono's commercial?"

The ad campaign was very successful, making cross-trainers Nike's number-two line behind its famous basketball shoes. It was subsequently parodied by the ProStars cartoon, which featured likenesses of Jackson, Gretzky, and Jordan. Jackson would say he "knew" something in almost every episode.

There was also a Public Service Announcement variant encouraging students to stay in school which had multiple copies of Bo appearing simultaneously humorously discussing how Bo knows various academic subjects.

In popular culuture and spoofs

In popular culture, the phrase was well known enough for street vendors to hawk T-shirts which such modified versions of the slogan as, "Bo Knows New Kids on the Block Suck."

It was also parodied in a "Sesame Street" sketch where Jackson demonstrated various things that the show teaches (letters, numbers, opposites), with the "Sesame Street" Muppets making "Bo Knows" comments in between. At the end of the sketch, a Little Bo Peep Muppet says, "Bo, you don't know Peep." Jackson says, "No, but I will in a minute," and they introduce themselves.

Jackson also poked fun at the ad campaign during a guest appearance on a first season episode of "". In the scene, he played basketball with Clark, portrayed by Dean Cain. Bo clearly is the better athlete, until Clark uses his flying abilities to catch the ball. Bo replies, "Bo don't know that!"

External links

* [http://www.adweek.com/aw/creative/best_spots_90s/90s_112.jsp Adweek citation as one of the best TV commercials of the 1990s] .
* [http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,317833,00.html ""Say It Ain't Bo!"] , "Entertainment Weekly", July 27, 1990 (retrieved June 8, 2007).
* [http://www.aef.com/pdf/sbch7.pdf "The Sneaker Wars: Going Toe-to-Toe"] by Bernice Kanner, in "The Super Bowl of Advertising: How the Commercials Won the Game", Bloomberg Press, 2004. (PDF file)