Nike: move on.

Today, on the eve of Tiger Woods' long-anticipated return to professional golf at the Augusta Masters, Nike released a television commercial.



The ad, called "Earl and Tiger," uses the recorded voice of Woods' late father questioning his son's judgment, over an image of Tiger looking ashamed. In "On Par," The New York Times' golf blog, Richard Sandomir reports the ad first ran this evening at 6 p.m. Eastern on ESPN, and will run only until tomorrow afternoon.

I think it's awful.

Move on.

I and I'm sure hundreds of others in the PR industry have blogged at length about the need to get out in front of an issue that is destined to become a PR problem.

Think David Letterman vs. John Edwards. Letterman admitted to his infidelity before it hit the media, and the story was short-lived (and, frankly, was mostly about how well he handled the PR). Edwards denied, ran, denied, hid, denied, mocked the media outlets uncovering the truth, and denied some more before being spectacularly dragged into admitting it, creating a media circus for himself in the process.

"Tell the truth, tell it first, tell it all" is what we say in issues management. It hurts in the short term, but makes for a much longer long term.

However.

Once an issue has been beaten to death and into the afterlife, as the Tiger-Woods-is-a-no-good-philanderer story surely has, you let it go. You move on to your messages.

For Nike, that means you let Tiger be a golfer again.

Sandomir's "On Par" post quotes Bob Dorfman, the executive vice president of Baker Street Advertising, as saying that "Nike had to address, or at least, allude, to Woods’s personal problems. “They’d take a lot of flack if they didn’t,” he said."

I disagree.

Tiger was decked out in what The Guardian's Lawrence Donegan called his "his Nike-branded sackcloth and ashes" at his news conference at Augusta earlier this week, as he addressed reporters' questions about his return to the game as well as the scandal.

Nike's continued sponsorship of Tiger throughout recent months has communicated the company's commitment to Tiger, the golfer. It doesn't need to make any more comment than that.

Woods' return to golf is the opportunity to turn the page, to re-build Tiger's brand as much as is possible. Sure, the media are likely to keep flogging the sex addiction story -- but by now, it's lost its shock value. People are tired of hearing about it. People want to move on; and as soon as the tournament begins, they may just be more interested in how he plays than how humiliated he is.

That's where Nike should be focusing.

Domino’s Pizza goes negative on itself

There’s an interesting story running in Slate this week about a new Domino’s Pizza campaign, in which Domino’s repeats its own customers’ negative feedback in ads about its new and improved recipe.

At the centre of the campaign is a four-minute documentary-style piece on YouTube, from which 30-second commercials have been made. It opens with negative tweets about Domino’s Pizza from real Twitter users, and goes on to show focus groups in which real tasters (i.e., actual focus group participants, not actors) offer bad review after bad review. The piece then covers how seriously Domino’s takes customer feedback, the process it went through to address its customers' complaints, and how its new product is better than ever.



If you look at the website for the new campaign, you’ll find this video, as well as a round-up of other coverage, including what looks like a live Twitter stream of tweets about Domino’s; it features tweets using the hashtags #newpizza and #dominos, as well as those including the profile @dominos and, as I wrote this blog entry, included both positive and negative reviews.

Multiple-choice question:

A company that’s willing to draw attention to its critics’ opinions must be:

a. Crazy
b. Not business savvy
c. Confident that it has fixed the problems

My answer is “c” – but if Domino’s isn’t confident the market is going to love this new pizza (or, at least, see it as an improvement), my answer changes to “a” and “b”. Domino’s’ customers had better think its pizza is markedly better than it was before, or the company will have a serious credibility gap to address.

Will this campaign get attention? Undoubtedly – and, as Beth Stevenson points out in the Slate article, likely more than a conventional “new and improved” campaign would have.

Is this approach unprecedented? No; as Paul Farhi points out in The Washington Post, other companies from GM to United Airlines and JetBlue – even this year’s Chicago Bears – have apologized for their own shortcomings in advertising.

Will it work? Only time – and how much better the pizza actually is – will tell.

Carnival Cruise Lines: Advertising that improves your PR stunt's image

Media Credit: Oliva Garrity. Source: www.thetriangle.org

I came across a video showing a Carnival Cruise Lines publicity stunt gone awry (sort of) as my first-year PR students were researching pseudo-events this past week.

As this article in The Daily Pennsylvanian describes, Carnival staged a major publicity stunt in Philadelphia in November 2008, in which it built – and invited the public to come and enjoy – the world’s largest piñata.

It sounds like a great idea. Carnival markets itself to a young, fun-loving audience with the tagline “Fun For All. All For Fun.” and many of its most popular cruises include ports of call in Mexico. The world’s largest piñata would seem to be a great fit.

According to another article, Carnival never planned to actually bash the giant piñata with a wrecking ball on-site; rather, the plan was for the wrecking ball to come close, and for trap doors to open via remote control, spilling eight thousand pounds of candy into the square for the public to collect (with cameras rolling).

Imagine the planning that went into this event. Between the actual event plan, the building and filling of the piñata, the procurement of the wrecking ball, the advertising and media relations, dealing with the city for permits, security, first aid, and all the required staging, it would have been a huge undertaking.

But in the end, the moment the crowd was waiting for – the release of the candy – didn’t happen. Why? Because their publicity for this publicity event was too successful… and they didn’t have a plan B.



So why does the title of this post talk about advertising?

Because of this Carnival ad, which I also found on YouTube.

I don't know whether this is done with CGI or whether they edited footage of the event together with footage of a later, smaller, piñata opening; but either way, audiences nation-wide and beyond watching this commercial would have had the impression that the event had gone off without a hitch.

Does it matter?

You tell me.

Either way, Carnival did legitimately earn its Guinness World Record for the world's largest piñata; it'll be able to leverage that distinction for publicity purposes (including the ad, above) until its record is broken by some other publicity-hunter.

VisitDenmark: when your ads cause bad PR

Advertising folks have it tough, having, as they often do, to find the line between "edgy and new" and "offensive." This is especially true when their clients' audiences are wide-ranging, and collectively have a broad definition of what's acceptable.

I can remember many a time in my corporate career when I engaged in spirited debate with my ad department colleagues over proposed campaigns I knew were going to offend people in our target markets. They usually fell into the "humour" category; that is, they would have been very funny to some people in our market, and offensive to others. The fact that more people would likely be entertained than offended by them was irrelevant, from a PR perspective: the proposed ads were disrespectful of certain groups, so I knew the inevitable complaints would have news value.

In Denmark last week, the national tourism authority got a little taste of what happens when "edgy" ads cause bad PR.

The Danish tourism department, VisitDenmark, had to pull a video it had posted to YouTube less than a week earlier, following outrage among Danish citizens about the image of Denmark the video portrayed. In the video, an attractive young woman speaks to an anonymous man with whom she had a fling a year and a half ago, remembering fondly the Danish attractions they enjoyed, and letting him know their evening together had produced a beautiful son.

Denmark Wants You to Sleep with its Loose Women | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com

The video became a quick sensation on YouTube, reportedly attracting 800,000 hits in the few days it was posted (likely because it wasn't clear the whole thing was staged). Once it became known that VisitDenmark was behind the video, however, the news quickly turned to Danes' insulted reaction.

As The Huffington Post reports, VisitDenmark manager Dorte Kiilerich explained the ad was meant to tell "a nice and sweet story about a grown-up woman who lives in a free society and accepts the consequences of her actions." A sociologist quoted in the same article had a different take on it, echoing the perception that embarrassed and outraged some Danes: "you can lure fast, blonde Danish women home without a condom."

VisitDenmark is affiliated with the Danish government; and in this case, it appears its communicators forgot about one of their client's key audiences: the Danish people. This is a key issue that presents a struggle for many organizations: reconciling the needs, tastes and expectations of different audiences. The ad team may have been focusing on the target audience for the spot -- that is, non-Danes with the potential to travel there -- and forgotten its client's most important audience (the taxpayers of Denmark).

While Denmark is known to be a liberal country, it appears the ad team misjudged the public's tolerance level for casual sex; accepting a certain behaviour in your society is one thing, and being characterized and identified by that behaviour is quite another. It might even be true that opposition to the campaign came from a relatively small segment of the population -- but it doesn't matter, because the news value of a government-supported international message suggesting Danes are promiscuous is clear.

In advertising and PR alike, it's important to really know your audiences. The better you're able to predict their reactions to issues and situations, the more likely you'll be to create messages they find compelling -- and to avoid ticking them off.

Have you heard about the Nissan cube?

I hadn’t – that is, until a student sent me a link to a site maligning the campaign Nissan used to launch it in Canada (thanks Adam!). My first thought was "all I know about this car is that someone doesn’t like the way it was launched; I’ll bet that’s not what Nissan was going for."

So I Googled it – and was impressed. (I just hope Nissan read the market correctly, and that now’s the right time to target a car launch to a niche audience.)

As Nick Krewen tells it in an interesting article in Monday’s thestar.com, Nissan launched the car in Canada in mid-March using an all-social media campaign: no television, radio, print, or outdoor advertising. The campaign was a contest aimed at younger, "creative" Canadians, to create an online submission about the new car and promote it using social media; the prize: one of 50 cubes to be given away. (It rings notes reminiscent of Tourism Queensland’s celebrated “Best Job in the World” campaign, which I blogged about last month.) The eventual 50 cube winners, announced a couple of weeks ago, were chosen from among 500 contest finalists. Here’s one of them:



While I’m lukewarm on using only social media for any mass-market consumer launch, this one appears to be the start of a larger integrated campaign. Nissan's "hypercube" website media page provides a lot of detail about the campaign, including the post-contest continuation of the campaign through winners' blogs, the impact of its community-building focus, and some measurement of campaign awareness.

In the States, the post-launch marketing campaign Nissan has been running combines new with traditional media, and it appears Nissan has taken a user-generated content approach to that, too. The company reportedly engaged communication students at 10 U.S. universities to conceive and run cube ad campaigns on their own campuses, competing for the chance to pitch their campaigns to Nissan executives. [Note to Nissan: if you're considering the same approach in Canada, start here! We have an excellent advertising and PR program at Red River College.] Nissan’s agency has integrated Web 2.0 elements into its traditional advertising, including a call-to-action to SMS Nissan for access to exclusive content including music, ringtones and video. The U.S. campaign reportedly also involves product placements ranging from a cube “cameo” on an episode of NBC’s Heroes to a role in a graphic novel on the NBC website devoted to the show, as well as a free iPhone game called “cube Party Roundup.”

There is almost always crossover between the U.S. and Canadian markets, and I would imagine the Canadian marketing strategy will take a similar combined new/traditional media approach. Either way, I’ll be interested to see how it translates into vehicle sales (the true test of the campaign's effectiveness, as long as the cube lives up to its billing and actually meets a market demand).

And what of the complaint site that initially brought this campaign to my attention? I don’t know whether there’s any merit to its claims, but it does illustrate a risk of any campaign these days: there’s always the possibility that someone complaining about your product will reach your potential customers before your own messaging does.

You make that risk even greater if you limit your own messaging to a niche audience – and yet further, if you go out of your way to engage the “creative” class, as Nissan openly discusses having done. Participants among the “creative” class are certainly likely to get attention for your product among their peers – but they’re also well-positioned to get attention for complaints about your organization.

I'll bet that, from Nissan’s perspective, the risk was worth it.