Ozzy Osbourne’s Margarine Commercial Proved the Power of the Personal Brand

The entertainment industry lost a giant with the death of Ozzy Osbourne on July 22, but the advertising world is bidding its own smaller, though no less significant, adieu.

Sure, Osbourne wasn’t the multi-brand endorsement machine that, say, David Beckham is. Nor was he in marketing’s “let’s just forget about them” category like O.J. Simpson or Ye. And, admittedly, the iconic Black Sabbath frontman only did a relative handful of ads, pairing his pale visage with brands like World of Warcraft and Liquid Death.

Nevertheless, Osbourne deserves a place in the annals of marketing history, if only for one spot—significant because it marked not just a rare moment of cultural coolness for a mainstream advertiser, but also for marking the inception of something more consequential and enduring: the Ozzy personal brand.

We speak of the 30 seconds in February 2006 when Osbourne—the parentally feared and bad-assed heavy metal demigod—showed up in an ad for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

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The spot was a cooking skit in which Osbourne shared the spotlight with Ozzy impersonator Jon Culshaw. “Pass me the butter, man,” real Ozzy told ersatz Ozzy, who opened the fridge to find a block of butter sitting alongside a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, a lower-calorie spread owned by Unilever at the time. (The brand is now in private equity hands; Unilever did not respond by press time for a comment.)

A befuddled Ozzy then turned to face the first Ozzy and said: “I can’t tell the difference!”

Details are scant as to why Osbourne—who filled stadiums for his concerts and enjoyed a reported net worth of $220 million—felt the need to endorse a spread for toast. But the larger point here is that this very domestic brand was comfortable having Osbourne as its public face.

After all, this was the guy who called himself the Prince of Darkness, sported pentagrams, threw raw meat at his fans, and once bit the head off a bat.

Why take a chance on a celeb like that? Well, maybe because the Ozzy of 2006 wasn’t the Ozzy people thought they knew just a few years before.

Osbourne had long maintained that his fanged smile and satanic trappings were just an act. “It’s all just a role that I play,” he told The New York Times in 1992. “I’m not the antichrist. I am a family man.” 

In 2002, MTV gave Osbourne a chance to prove his point. The result was The Osbournes, a home-based reality show whose singular moments included the aging rocker trying to work a TV remote and picking up the family dog’s poop. An immediate hit, the show drew 8 million viewers at its peak and kicked open the door for everyone from Pawn Stars to the Kardashians.

Whether or not all those viewers (or even Osbourne himself) were fully aware of the fact, the show was a remaking machine that catalyzed Ozzy’s personal brand—distinct from his black-caped stage mania and, in his unselfconscious befuddlement, one that turned out to be self-effacing, funny, and extremely likable.

It’s one reason why, in the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spot, the two Ozzys could stand at a kitchen counter strewn with human skulls and everyone got the joke.

Today, a generation later, the notion of celebrities being brands unto themselves is a given. But the emergence of the real, and surprisingly ordinary, Ozzy Osbourne was an early peek at how important those brands would end up being, and how agreeable—and ultimately bankable—they are.