Jackson was the first athlete in the modern era to play professional baseball and football in the same year. He was a suitable spokesman for Nike's shoe geared toward an athlete engaged in more than one sport or with little time between activities to switch to sport-specific footwear.
Original ad
The original "Bo Knows" ad was a television commercial by firm Wieden & Kennedy. The spot opens with a shot of Jackson playing baseball and fellow ballplayer Kirk Gibson saying, "Bo knows baseball." The next scene shows Jackson on the gridiron, with quarterbackJim Everett explaining, "Bo knows football." Jackson then plays basketball, tennis, ice hockey, and goes running, with Michael Jordan, John McEnroe, and Joan Benoit vouching for Jackson's knowledge of their sports (Wayne Gretzky, when confronted with Jackson laying a body check, simply says "No.") The ad concludes with Jackson trying to play the guitar—and failing badly—whereupon blues legend Bo Diddley exclaims, "Bo, you don't know Diddley!" Coincidentally, the spot first aired during the commercial break immediately following Jackson's lead-off home run in the 1989 Major League Baseball All-Star Game. The music for the "Cross Training" ads was written and performed by Diddley.
In one version of the commercial, after Jackson is shown trying several activities, a confused Sonny Bono walks into the shot and says (playing off the tag line), "I thought this was another Bono's commercial."
In another, Bo Jackson grew frustrated with an over-the-top musical number and walked off the set. George Foreman, sensing an opportunity to seize the spotlight, took his place in the musical number.
The ad campaign was very successful, making cross-trainers Nike's number-two line behind its famous basketball shoes. It was subsequently parodied by the ProStars cartoon, which featured likenesses of Jackson, Wayne Gretzky, and Michael Jordan. While the character based on Jackson spoke normally, he would say in the third person "Bo knows [____]" when asked or prompted to do something in almost every episode.
There was also a public service announcement variant encouraging students to stay in school, which had multiple copies of Bo appearing simultaneously humorously discussing how Bo knows various academic subjects.
The "Bo Knows" campaign also appeared in Madden NFL 22.
In a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode from 1990, the character Donatello confronts a villain while saying "Donatello knows bō."[2] The bō is a wooden staff that Donatello used as his weapon.
A Sesame Street sketch (1991) where Jackson demonstrated various things that the show teaches (letters, numbers, opposites), with the Sesame Street Muppets making "Bo Knows" comments in between.[3]
In a Homestar Runner short from 2008, two characters come across a very rotten Easter egg with "BO KNOWS EASTER EGGS" written on it, implying it has been there for several years.[4]
"The Sneaker Wars: Going Toe-to-Toe" by Bernice Kanner, in The Super Bowl of Advertising: How the Commercials Won the Game, Bloomberg Press, 2004. (PDF file)