The Endorsement Deal Is Becoming an Ownership Deal

Strategic Analysis | September 19, 2026

Kylian Mbappé did not merely switch shoe companies.

When Swiss sportswear company On announced its move into football on September 18, it unveiled Mbappé as the centerpiece of the strategy after his roughly two-decade relationship with Nike. On says Mbappé has been working with its product team to help develop the company’s first football products. Reuters reported another important detail: his compensation includes both cash and equity.

Nine days earlier, prediction-market company Novig introduced Sydney Sweeney as the star of its first national advertising campaign. But its own announcement described her as something more than a spokesperson: Sweeney had joined the company as a “strategic partner and equity holder.”

Those words matter.

For most of advertising history, the transaction was straightforward. A company paid a famous person. The famous person lent the company some combination of attention, credibility, cultural relevance and image rights. The check cleared. The campaign ended. Everybody went home.

That model is not disappearing.

But at the upper end of sports and entertainment, a different model is increasingly sitting beside it:

Do not merely pay me to make your company more valuable. Let me own part of the value I help create.

That idea applies just as naturally to an athlete as it does to an actor, musician, podcaster, YouTuber or TikTok creator. And it reflects a larger change in the economics of fame.

The most powerful talent no longer sees audience attention solely as something to sell.

They are starting to treat it as capital.

Celebrity equity deals are not new.

Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson provided one of the famous early examples. He received an ownership interest in Glacéau while promoting Vitaminwater and its Formula 50 product. When Coca-Cola acquired Glacéau for roughly $4.1 billion in 2007, the stake produced a payout that Forbes later estimated at approximately $100 million.

The lesson was hard to miss.

A commercial pays once.

Ownership can pay when everybody else gets paid.

Ryan Reynolds subsequently built an even more sophisticated version of the model. Rather than merely appearing in Mint Mobile advertising, Reynolds became an owner and central creative force behind the brand. When T-Mobile acquired Mint's parent, Ka'ena, in 2024, the transaction valued the business at up to $1.35 billion, with T-Mobile specifically announcing that Reynolds would continue in a creative role after closing.

The difference today is not that celebrities suddenly discovered equity.

It is that the infrastructure of the entertainment economy is making the model easier to repeat.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau projects U.S. creator advertising spending at $44 billion in 2026, after $37 billion in 2025. Nearly half of creator-ad buyers surveyed for its 2025 report described creators as a “must buy.”

And the market is beginning to build machinery specifically for equity-for-influence transactions. OWM launched in 2025 as a platform designed to help creators and startups structure and administer equity deals, with agencies including Wasserman and VaynerSports participating in its ecosystem. Axios reported that the platform had already signed up thousands of creators and hundreds of companies.

That is the more important development.

A quirky deal structure is becoming a category.

At first glance, giving equity to an endorser sounds expensive.

Sometimes it is.

But consider what the company is actually purchasing.

A conventional ambassador delivers media. A genuine owner can potentially deliver media, distribution, product feedback, customer acquisition, recruiting credibility, investor visibility and a continuing incentive to increase enterprise value.

In other words, equity can convert a campaign into an alignment mechanism.

That is particularly attractive to challenger brands.

Nike can purchase enormous cultural reach because Nike already possesses enormous financial resources and distribution. A younger company trying to attack an incumbent often has the opposite profile: less cash, less distribution and less cultural legitimacy—but potentially much more upside.

Equity bridges that gap.

Instead of saying:

We will pay you $10 million to tell people we matter.

the challenger can effectively say:

Help us become the company that can eventually pay everyone $100 million.

That is much closer to venture finance than traditional advertising.

It also explains why the Mbappé-On structure is strategically interesting. On is not signing Mbappé merely to move another line of existing football boots. It is entering a category dominated by entrenched incumbents, developing its first football products and using Mbappé's credibility in the sport as part of the market-entry strategy itself. On describes the relationship as co-creation: Mbappé, Thierry Henry and Sydney Schertenleib are providing experience and product input while the company builds its football business.

That is not simply endorsement.

It is closer to using talent as human growth infrastructure.

The economic logic is even easier to understand from the talent side.

Imagine that a creator can generate $30 million of incremental enterprise value for a company.

A $3 million endorsement fee may once have looked terrific.

Today, sophisticated talent may ask the uncomfortable follow-up:

Why am I selling the company $30 million of value for $3 million every year?

That calculation becomes especially powerful when talent controls its own distribution.

An athlete with tens of millions of followers does not merely supply a face for advertising. A creator with a loyal audience is not merely acting in an advertisement placed into somebody else's media channel.

The talent is the media channel.

And increasingly, the talent can also become the manufacturer, distributor or owner.

MrBeast demonstrates the endpoint of that progression. Bloomberg reported in 2025 that Feastables—the consumer-products company majority-owned by Beast Industries—generated roughly $250 million in annual sales and more than $20 million in profit, while MrBeast's underlying media business generated similar revenue but lost money.

That is an extraordinary inversion of the old entertainment model.

Historically, the content created the celebrity and the celebrity monetized the content.

Increasingly, the content creates the audience, and the audience becomes the acquisition engine for an owned business.

The advertisement is no longer necessarily the product.

Sometimes the advertisement is the distribution system.

The terminology around these agreements can make them sound simpler than they are.

“Equity partner.”

“Strategic investor.”

“Co-owner.”

“Brand partner.”

But an equity endorsement actually combines at least two separate economic relationships.

One is the familiar commercial relationship:

The other is an investment relationship:

Those questions are not theoretical.

A 2025 SEC filing provides an unusually clear example. Agassi Sports Entertainment Corp. entered into a five-year “Brand Partner Agreement” with Stefanie Graf covering advisory services, celebrity endorsement, social-media promotion, consultation and a worldwide license of her name, likeness, voice and related rights. The agreement even separately requires Graf's approval before the company creates or uses avatars, digital twins, NFTs or AI-related versions of her image.

Her compensation was not a conventional endorsement check.

It was warrants permitting her to purchase up to one million shares of company stock at $5.50 per share. The separate warrant instrument addresses exercise mechanics, cashless exercise, adjustments for capital changes and other protections that would never appear in the traditional “three posts and a photo shoot” model.

The old endorsement agreement asked how many commercials the talent owed.

The new agreement may also have to answer what happens in a merger.

There is a seductive way to describe all of this:

Talent finally gets the upside.

True.

But equity does something else simultaneously.

It transfers risk from the company to the talent.

Cash is cash.

Private-company stock might eventually be worth ten times its stated value.

It may also be worth nothing.

It can be diluted. It can sit behind preferred investors with liquidation preferences. It can remain illiquid for years. The business may raise another round at a lower valuation. A promised IPO may never happen. A sale may occur on terms that produce a terrific headline valuation and little meaningful distribution to common holders.

The SEC expressly warns that securities issued under compensatory Rule 701 arrangements are generally restricted securities and cannot simply be freely traded without registration or another exemption.

That means the headline number attached to an equity grant can be dangerously misleading.

“One percent of a $100 million company” sounds like $1 million.

But unless somebody will actually buy the stake for $1 million, it is not the economic equivalent of a $1 million wire transfer.

Valuation is not liquidity.

Sophisticated talent therefore should not evaluate an equity deal merely by asking, “How much stock am I getting?”

The more useful question is:

What exactly must happen before this stock becomes money?

There is another consequence when spokespeople become owners: audiences need to understand that the recommendation may affect the speaker's personal investment.

The FTC's endorsement framework already requires disclosure of material relationships that consumers would not reasonably expect. The agency's guidance is intentionally broad: financial, employment, personal and other material connections can require clear and conspicuous disclosure.

Ownership makes that analysis especially interesting.

The FTC's current guidance expressly says that merely stating that an endorser was “paid” may not adequately describe the relationship if the person is an employee or co-owner. It separately warns that vague descriptions such as “partner” or “ambassador” may be unclear.

That means the disclosure vocabulary may be lagging behind the economics.

“#ad” tells the audience there was compensation.

It does not necessarily communicate:

I own part of this company and become wealthier if you help increase its value.

That distinction will become harder to ignore as ownership-based sponsorship spreads.

And if the talent begins promoting an investment rather than merely a consumer product, a second regulatory system can enter the picture.

Federal securities law contains specific anti-touting requirements. The SEC charged Kim Kardashian in 2022 for promoting a crypto asset security without disclosing the nature, source and amount of compensation she received, resulting in a $1.26 million settlement. Earlier cases against Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled arose from similar undisclosed promotions of ICOs.

That does not mean ordinary equity-holding brand ambassadors suddenly become securities promoters every time they praise sneakers or chocolate.

It does mean the line matters.

Promoting the product is one thing.

Promoting the investment can be another.

There is an additional securities issue that receives much less public attention.

A private company cannot simply decide that shares are another form of swag.

The issuance itself requires a lawful securities-law pathway.

Rule 701, for example, provides a federal registration exemption for certain compensatory issuances by private companies to employees, consultants and advisers. But consultants and advisers qualify only when providing bona fide services that are not connected with capital raising and do not directly or indirectly promote a market for the issuer's securities.

Other exemptions may be used instead.

The Graf transaction shows the point nicely. Agassi Sports Entertainment did not characterize the warrant issuance casually as marketing compensation and stop there. Its SEC filing expressly claimed an exemption under Securities Act Section 4(a)(2) and/or Rule 506, represented that Graf was an accredited investor and disclosed transfer restrictions on the securities.

Once an endorsement includes securities, the cap table has entered the contract.

So has securities counsel.

Another uncomfortable feature of equity compensation is that tax and liquidity do not always arrive together.

Under Internal Revenue Code Section 83, property transferred in connection with services is generally taxed when it becomes transferable or is no longer subject to a substantial risk of forfeiture, unless another treatment applies. Restricted-stock recipients can sometimes elect under Section 83(b) to recognize income earlier. Different rules apply to options and restricted stock units.

The practical point is simpler than the tax code:

A person can receive taxable economic value without receiving cash.

For someone holding stock in a closely held company, that distinction matters enormously.

A talent representative negotiating the glamorous part of the deal without modeling the tax consequences is negotiating only half the deal.

Perhaps the most interesting strategic problem arises when the marketing relationship ends but the investment does not.

Traditional sponsorship disputes have familiar remedies. A brand invokes a morals clause. Talent alleges wrongful termination. The parties fight over outstanding fees, continued use of NIL rights or exclusivity.

Equity adds another layer.

Suppose the talent still owns three percent of the company after being fired as spokesperson.

The brand may no longer want the celebrity anywhere near its advertising.

The celebrity may nonetheless want the company to prosper.

Or perhaps the opposite happens: the relationship deteriorates publicly, the talent begins criticizing the company and both sides realize that the supposed “alignment” created by equity has produced a shareholder who is economically invested but commercially hostile.

That is why the interaction between the endorsement agreement and equity documents matters so much.

Termination provisions, vesting schedules, repurchase rights, change-of-control treatment, confidentiality restrictions, transfer rights and post-termination use of NIL cannot be negotiated in isolation.

The campaign may end on Friday. The cap table does not necessarily care.

There is an obvious reason not every endorsement should become an equity deal.

For most talent, cash is better.

That is not shortsighted. It is portfolio theory.

An athlete already has extraordinary economic exposure to one uncertain asset: the athlete's own career. A creator's income may already depend heavily on audience taste, algorithm changes and reputation. Taking compensation in speculative private-company stock adds another concentrated risk rather than diversifying it.

Companies also have reasons to resist.

Equity is expensive when the business succeeds. Cap tables become messy. Small shareholders can create administrative burdens. Giving influential celebrities investment rights can complicate information sharing, financing and future transactions.

And none of the headline success stories should obscure survivorship bias.

Everybody remembers Vitaminwater.

Nobody writes business-school cases about the endorsement equity that became worthless.

That is precisely why the likely future is not “equity replaces cash.”

It is hybrid compensation.

Cash creates certainty.

Equity creates optionality.

Royalties, revenue shares and performance bonuses can sit between the two.

For the most valuable talent, the negotiation becomes less about choosing one form of compensation and more about constructing the right portfolio of them.

The direction of travel is larger than celebrity investing.

The boundaries separating endorser, investor, adviser, distributor and founder are dissolving.

That will change who has leverage.

Talent with interchangeable fame but little direct audience conversion may still be paid like media inventory.

Talent that can prove customer acquisition, mobilize a community, shape product design or open a new market can increasingly negotiate like a strategic partner.

And the agencies and lawyers representing them will have to develop capabilities that historically belonged to venture investors.

If compensation is stock, somebody needs to understand the capitalization table.

If compensation is options, somebody needs to understand exercise economics.

If the company is private, somebody needs to examine financing history, preference structure, transfer restrictions and realistic liquidity.

If the company is public, access to confidential business information can introduce insider-trading and information-control questions; SEC rules recognize duties of trust or confidence where a person has agreed to keep information confidential.

If the talent becomes an owner, somebody must determine what ownership actually buys.

That is a very different exercise from negotiating a day rate.

The endorsement business was built on a simple exchange:

Company money for celebrity attention.

That exchange is becoming more sophisticated because attention itself has become a form of economic infrastructure.

Athletes, musicians, actors and creators can now communicate with consumers directly, repeatedly and at enormous scale. The most powerful among them increasingly understand that selling that capability exclusively for cash can mean surrendering the most valuable part of the transaction: the enterprise value their influence helps create.

Brands understand it too.

So the endorsement deal is moving onto the cap table.

That can produce spectacular upside.

It can also produce dilution, illiquidity, tax obligations, securities-law issues, disclosure problems and years of exposure to a company the talent does not control.

Which is why the smartest version of this trend is not simply:

Take equity.

It is:

Know exactly what you are becoming an owner of.

Because once the spokesperson owns the company, even a little bit, it is no longer just an ad.

It is an investment.