Steve Stoute on the making of a legendary Reebok commercial

Ad Age is marking Black History Month 2023 with our third-annual Honoring Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction here.) Today, Translation and UnitedMasters Founder and CEO Steve Stoute—our final guest editor of the month—offers his thoughts on the making of a legendary Reebok commercial starring Allen Iverson and Jadakiss.

In 2001, I just transitioned from the music business to the advertising business, and my first responsibility was to restore the Reebok brand to win the hearts and minds of the youth audience—starting with a commercial.

The commercial paired NBA superstar Allen Iverson with hip-hop musician Jadakiss to signify the arrival of a new era of Reebok. The Reebok commercial was pivotal in my career because it was really the first commercial I’d ever done. I didn’t know anything about making a TV commercial at that time. 

I knew I wanted to bring forth street culture, basketball culture and rap music to mainstream screens. To capture the common thread between rap music and street basketball meant the commercial would feel more like a music video. No one thought that a commercial shot in the style of a music video as a way to sell or move a product would work. 

The naysayers were people actually in the company that I was working with. 

I thought we should get Hype Williams, one of the greatest directors of music videos in the history of music videos, to direct this commercial. I knew that if we got his eye and his vision, it was going to be better than any TV commercial out then, even though they all said music video directors don’t transfer well for TV commercials.

I fundamentally believed in the insight that basketball players “aspired” to be rappers and rappers “aspired” to be basketball players. The strategic insight of marrying those two worlds, the sport of basketball and the art of hip-hop music, was something that, if told correctly, would be magic. 

What came out was a classic. Jadakiss wrote an original rap that highlighted the product, the Allen Iverson A5 by Rbk. The music from the commercial ended up getting played on the radio. The advertising industry had never seen a song that came from a commercial get played on the radio. 

It also evolved into something bigger than just another TV commercial. It’s something that’s been replicated and referenced many, many times. When you look back at some of the influential moments when hip-hop became mainstream or became a soundtrack for advertising, it played a huge role. And not just the music. It subsequently led to us making artists’ sneakers before anyone else had—this was the Jay Z Reebok S. Carter sneaker, which led to the 50 Cent G-Unit sneaker, the Daddy Yankee sneaker, the Billionaire Boys Club Pharrell sneaker. 

The idea of making hip-hop sneakers was one of the key reasons why Adidas acquired Reebok and went on to continue to do it to this day. 

I was a 29-year-old guy doing a commercial for the first time. No one believed in me or my vision. Even though I was new to the advertising business and trying to break in, I stayed committed to an innovative idea that went against legacy ideas, and it worked. 

This one commercial had a deep, long-term impact. I’ve had a lot of great moments in my career, but that moment early on gave me the confidence that I could win at advertising.