The world already knows that Fidel Castro, the temporarily sidelined president of Cuba, was a pitcher in his younger days — he even briefly played with a barnstorming team after the revolution — and remains a huge sports fan. Now it knows something else: like Zinédine Zidane, Tracy McGrady and Reggie Bush, Mr. Castro is an Adidas man.

Not that Adidas, the multinational athletic equipment company based in Germany, is taking out billboards to spread the news. Rather, the world’s news media spread the word after the Cuban government released the first photographs of Mr. Castro, 80, recuperating from surgery for intestinal bleeding in Havana. Mr. Castro was shown in a resplendent red, white and blue jacket with an Adidas symbol on the right breast, the kind of unintentional product endorsement that any company trying to sell in the United States might want to avoid.

“We don’t really look at it as anything,” said Travis Gonzolez, head of public relations for Adidas, adding that the company also provided athletic shoes to President Bush. “It’s not a positive, not a negative.”

“We are a sports brand. We are making products for athletes, we are not making them for leaders.”

The company had received neither praise nor complaints about the Castro photographs. Mr. Gonzolez said the company had a longstanding relationship with the country’s Olympic team, adding, “We are more proud when the Cuban athletes win Olympic medals, because we provided them the tools to succeed.” The jacket, he said, appeared to be a generic tracksuit from the country’s sports federation.

Michael Cucka, a partner at Group 1066, a marketing strategy and branding company, described the worldwide publicity around the photograph as an example of how increasingly, “companies don’t control their brands anymore.”

In the past it was simpler, he said: “You hire Tiger Woods, pay him millions of dollars, he’s in your ad campaigns, and the company is in control of its brand.”

Of course, similar examples of inadvertent product placement go back at least to 1994, when it was reported that sales of the Ford Bronco rose 25 percent immediately after O.J. Simpson drove one down the San Diego Freeway and across America’s TV screens, though Ford executives at the time stressed that sports utility vehicles were doing well generally. Likewise, Mr. Cucka said he remembered an ad for The Economist that was simply a photograph of President Bill Clinton leaving Air Force 1 holding a copy of the magazine.

“It’s a new world,” Mr. Cucka said. “Consumers have more of a say of what a brand says — it could be bad, could be good.” NOAM COHEN


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/business/media/21adidas.html