Before algorithms, there was Michael: Ads that made the King of Pop a brand unto himself

The word 'influencer' is barely a decade old, but the practice it describes is as old as fame itself. Long before social media democratised brand advocacy, a very small number of people held the power to move markets simply by association. Michael Jackson was one of them, arguably the first to do so at a truly planetary scale.

Jackson's commercial partnerships, spread across the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, weren't just lucrative deals for both sides. They were, in retrospect, the original blueprint for integrated brand-celebrity storytelling, the kind that the advertising industry now pays consultants handsomely to decode. Between 1983 and 1997, every deal Jackson signed redefined what celebrity endorsement could look like: in deal size, creative ambition, and sheer cultural impact.

The timing was everything. His solo peak coincided with the rise of MTV, the explosion of global television, and a fast-maturing advertising industry hungry for a new language. Brands that aligned with Jackson weren't just buying eyeballs, they were buying into a phenomenon that transcended race, nationality, and language, at a time when truly global celebrities were vanishingly rare. The numbers that followed spoke for themselves.

Suzuki - “Love is my Message”

Before the world knew him as the King of Pop, a young Michael Jackson was already walking into commercial television. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jackson appeared in a series of advertisements for Suzuki Love scooters, produced exclusively for the Japanese market. The spots were characteristically of the era: bright, kinetic, built around performance. Jackson executed his signature dance moves, the scooter gleaming in the background, each spot closing on the same simple line: "Love is my message."

It was, by any measure, a modest campaign as it was geographically limited and culturally specific. But it was also a preview of the commercial logic that would define the next decade of his career: align the product with the performer's energy and let the performance carry the brand. Suzuki got that right early.

PepsiCo - “The Choice of the New Generation”

Nothing in celebrity endorsement history before or since quite matches the moment when Michael Jackson and PepsiCo announced their partnership in November 1983. It was, by any metric, a landmark deal, a $5 million contract that shattered every previous record for a celebrity endorsement, at a time when legendary athlete O.J. Simpson had been earning $400,000 annually to front Hertz rental cars. The advertising industry took notice immediately.

The campaign, titled New Generation, positioned Pepsi as the soda of choice for a younger, more vibrant America. Jackson reworked his chart-dominating Billie Jean for the spots, and the rewritten chorus became one of the most-replicated jingle formats in commercial history.

This wasn't a star turning up on set to smile next to a can. It was a genuine creative collaboration, and the market responded accordingly. Pepsi sales reached $7.7 billion in 1984, with market share climbing as Coca-Cola's dropped. The deal effectively weaponised popular culture in the Cola Wars, and brands have been chasing that same integration ever since.

The campaign is also remembered for a darker moment: on 27 January 1984, during the filming of the 'Convention' commercial, a pyrotechnic malfunction set Jackson's hair alight. He suffered second and third-degree burns and underwent medical treatment and surgery. Yet the partnership survived: a testament to both the commercial stakes and the mutual investment both sides had made.

Pepsi Co - “Bad”

The success of New Generation gave Pepsi the confidence to go bigger. In 1986, the two parties announced a second deal, this time for $10 million, double the original, built around the release of Jackson's ‘Bad’ album and his subsequent world tour. Where the first campaign had been limited to the United States, this one was truly global, covering promotional campaigns across more than 20 countries.

The format evolved significantly. The Bad-era campaign, known as 'The Chase', was a four-part miniseries format: Jackson escaping paparazzi in increasingly inventive ways, with Pepsi branding woven throughout rather than bolted on at the end. It was a sophisticated piece of branded storytelling by the standards of any era, and it influenced how advertisers thought about serialised commercial content for years afterwards. The campaign also helped finance Jackson's Bad World Tour, one of the highest-grossing concert tours of the decade, creating a flywheel of brand exposure that reinforced itself across multiple touchpoints simultaneously.

LA Gear - “Unstoppable”

By 1990, American footwear brand LA Gear was fighting hard for relevance in a market dominated by Nike and Reebok. Their solution was to sign Michael Jackson to a multi-million-dollar deal for a campaign called ‘Unstoppable’, a collaboration that produced a limited-edition signature sneaker line featuring buckles, studs, and dancing feet logos. On paper, it made perfect creative sense: Jackson was famous for his footwork, his extravagant performance wear, his single bejewelled glove and white sequined socks.

In practice, the partnership hit a structural problem that no amount of creative brilliance could solve: Jackson, famously, only ever wore loafers. He declined to wear the LA Gear shoes during his performances, and without that earned media amplification, the deal lost its primary commercial rationale. The collaboration was eventually cut short, a cautionary tale about the limits of even the most powerful celebrity endorsement when product-talent alignment is superficial rather than genuine.

The LA Gear episode remains one of the most-cited examples in endorsement strategy discussions about the importance of authentic fit, a lesson that the industry was, and still is, sometimes slow to learn.

California Raisins - “Michael Raisin”

Not every Michael Jackson endorsement was built around spectacle. In 1989, he collaborated with animator Will Vinton, the creator of Claymation, on a commercial for California Raisins, a campaign run by the California Raisin Advisory Board to increase raisin consumption. Jackson's involvement was, by his own standards, remarkably unguarded: he choreographed the animated 'Michael Raisin' character and reportedly provided voice work for free, simply because he loved the Claymation characters.

The commercial is a small but telling data point in any analysis of Jackson's brand partnerships. It reveals an endorsement logic that was occasionally personal and affection-driven rather than purely transactional, and it produced genuinely memorable advertising precisely because of that authenticity.

Esonic

In June 1997, Michael Jackson signed a contract to promote the video compact disc player for Esonic, a relatively niche electronics brand at the time. The deal was notable primarily as a late-career endorsement. By this point, Jackson was no longer signing the kind of landmark, culture-shaping deals that had defined the 1980s. The Esonic partnership was more transactional in nature, though Jackson's global recognition still carried commercial weight in markets where the brand had distribution ambitions.