How Did This Guy Turn This Guy Into Phillys Most Popular Pitchman?
In the late 1980s he was selling ads for Comcast cable when a marketing manager for a phone company said he’d buy some local spots if Kaplan could get Eagles running back Keith Byars to appear in them. Byars had played for Ohio State, the phone guy’s alma mater, and that’s what mattered. Kaplan hadn’t worked with athletes, but he wrote a proposal, lurked at the Eagles’ practice field near the Vet, and presented the deal to Byars, who said yes.
He built from there — more gigs for Eagles, Phillies, 76ers, Flyers. In 1994, Kaplan launched his own company, All Star Promotion. He got Eagles kicker David Akers his first endorsement, for restaurant/store/inn Doneckers in Ephrata. “I worked with Larry Bowa, Bill Bergey, did some stuff with Randall Cunningham. Got Brian Dawkins’s first deal, got Charlie Garner his first deal,” Kaplan says. “With Lenny Dykstra, I met the PR firm for Nicorette/Nicoderm at one of the Super Bowls, and they were looking for an athlete who had just quit smoking. Lenny was perfect. He had been chewing.” Kaplan won Irving Fryar a role in the movie Any Given Sunday. He got Eagles linebacker Omar Gaither a gig on Channel 6’s Football Frenzy and an endorsement deal with Woodbury Nissan.
Kaplan gets 20 percent of clients’ fees. Athletes may get a few thousand dollars for an appearance, maybe five figures for an endorsement. That’s lunch money for a pro athlete whose weekly pay looks like an Internet IP address. But plenty of players look for gigs between games. Many work cheap to get experience in broadcasting. A lot of them want Kaplan’s help in promoting charitable causes.
And they love free cars and trucks. Early on, Kaplan became the guy who could put an athlete in a new vehicle for plugging a local dealer. It makes no sense, he admits. Leasing a Bentley for many of these guys would be the equivalent, for a normal person, of signing up for Netflix. But players get special locker-room points when they roll up to practice in a killer ride they got for free just for being the studs they are.
“When [Flyers defenseman] Paul Coffey came to town, he said, ‘I heard you do this — I could really use a car,’” Kaplan says. “Okay, boom. I make a call, and now he’s got a car, so he’s happy.” Coffey did a commercial in which a Jeep dealer, starring as himself, yelled to his secretary, “Get me coffee!” and Coffey walked in wearing his uniform. (Kaplan wrote the script.)
Gaither says his entire compensation for his recent dealer endorsement was a Nissan Armada. Where’s Kaplan’s 20 percent in that?
“I let him drive sometimes,” Gaither says.
