How Bounty Got Edelman and Gronk to Eat Wings Like the Bros They Are

At the time of publication, more than half a million football fans have found their way to YouTube to watch four and a half minutes of retired New England Patriots greats Julian Edelman and Rob Gronkowski joshing one another while pigging out on chicken wings. As Super Bowl marketing goes (it’s actually pre-Super Bowl marketing: Bounty doesn’t have an ad in the game), it’s a notable departure from the standard formula of celeb endorsers talking up a product with varying degrees of believability. Bounty paper towels do take center stage, of course, but pretty much only to wipe the chops. Part of a series of athlete-studded episodes called “Spill the Sauce,” this shoot features the kind of chitchat that fans eat up, such as how Edelman defended himself with a BB gun after a teammate threw an egg at his head, and how Buffalo, New York, is the only town in America where you can get decent blue cheese. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIVUztQaeuc Julian Edelman and Rob Gronkowski being excellent bros. “You were my hero,” Gronk coos at Edelman, recalling their rookie days of 2010. “You were driving a nice sports car.” How’d a straight-laced corporation like Procter & Gamble get two paid endorsers to act as though they’re just sitting in a man cave? It all started last year during Super Bowl LVII, at a place called Radio Row. Big room, no food Set up every year in the days before the Big Game, Radio Row is the nerve center for some 140 media outlets—a huge room packed with reporters and program directors, coaches and players (whether they’re in the game or not), plus a slew of brands that want in on the pregame buzz. Last year, in the Phoenix Convention Center, those brands included FanDuel, DraftKings, Verizon, TikTok, Old Spice and Bounty. Bounty had recently hit on the insight that chicken wings are the most-consumed food during the Super Bowl and that, owing to the viscous mess that wings tend make, fans tend to use paper towels instead of napkins. Gronk’s job for Bounty was to walk around with some wings and, well, act like Gronk. (Think: 34-year-old man who’s still a teenager.) And while watching him, “we learned a couple things,” Bounty brand director Christina Cullis told Adweek. “No. 1, when you get into Radio Row, it's very difficult [for attendees] to leave because of the security. The other thing we learned is that nobody is feeding them.” It’s true. Radio Row has places to sit, places to podcast and no end of pitching from publicists—but there’s not a nibble in sight. Accordingly, when Bounty returns to Radio Row this year, it plans to serve some 4,000 wings out of a large booth. 4 Super Bowl Events in 36 Hours for Medium Rare Feature Plenty of Star Power But the Bounty people learned something else last year as they watched Gronk work the room. “He called himself the Bounty Man,” Cullis said. “But the idea of the campaign is that Bounty’s your wingman [when you’re eating], so we thought, ‘We need to give him a wingman.’ The obvious choice for his wingman is Julian Edelman.” Enter the wide receiver For readers under 40, the term wingman entered the popular lexicon partly as a result of the 1986 movie Top Gun, referring to the secondary pilot on a mission. Since then, it’s become synonymous with guys who are best buds. And these two actually are. Not only did Gronkowski and Edelman win the Super Bowl together in 2014, 2017 and 2018 (both played offense as tight end and wide receiver, respectively), they went clubbing on the night they met at a team autograph signing. Friends “from the very beginning,” as Edelman recently told People magazine, the two athletes still hang out, notably when taping NFL shows as game analysts. And so the repartee and ribbing in that video is real and—Cullis insists neither man was fed any lines to say, about Bounty or anything else. “They really went into it cold,” she said. “When you see them telling stories, that is 100% real, off the cuff.” Yet that kind of begs the question: If these two retired football stars are so great together, why not just cast them in a Super Bowl ad and pick up more than 100 million viewers? It’s not that that’s a bad idea. But the timing’s off. As Cullis explained, the time to advertise is now, when Americans are planning and shopping for Super Bowl parties. “We need to get in [shopping] carts when the wings are getting in the carts,” she said.