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.
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.
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