I found that whole trend really odd. I worked with a few of star athletes while at Nike. Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade. All of them had great input on what their performance expectations were and feedback on what fir their personal style. The tone Nike spent was when we work together on show we collaborate as peers. I always felt a lot of respect and appreciation for what we did on the product side and an excitement to be involved, and we echoed that back as it was pretty exciting to be working with them. Even though they were spokespeople in some regard, they also had to work in the product. The product had to perform and a bad product could lead to a career limiting injury. In fact, they would be putting the product through some of the most extreme performance conditions… even with all of that none of them seemed to feel the need to be called creative director.
So the whole celebrity creative director thing just baffled me. It feels so … tawdry. Now if any of them stopped performing, recording, or acting and sat with the team every day and actually designed phones, that would awesome, but a title does not make a person, a person makes a title.