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.

[yellow tail]: No good deed goes unpunished

PR Daily this morning alerted me to an issue brewing for Australia’s [yellow tail] wine company, which reportedly accounts for "almost half the Australian wine purchased in the U.S."

Last week, the company announced a $100,000 donation to The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), in a campaign called “[tails] for tails”. According to [yellow tail]’s news release, “[yellow tail] will make use of social media and in-store advertising to spread the message that consumers can "pick up a bottle of [yellow tail] and help a tail-wagging friend."”

Sounds nice, right? Kudos to [yellow tail] for sharing its success and putting some of its profits back into the community, right?

Not so fast, say American meat producers and members of associated industries, who are all too familiar with HSUS’s history of undertaking campaigns to interfere with their business.

In an article called “Yellow Tail stubs its toe” this week, beef industry magazine Drovers outlines the backlash [yellow tail] has drawn in the U.S. The opposition has grown quickly online, with a Facebook group called Yellowfail already counting almost 2400 fans. A YouTube video featuring a South Dakota cattle rancher (below) has more than 5800 views, and the #yellowfail hashtag on Twitter has been buzzing.



What’s a company to do?

Frankly, it’s impossible to keep everyone happy. Every corporate donation has the potential to irritate someone – whether it’s because they disagree with the cause you’ve supported, or because they feel your support would have benefited more people elsewhere.

But a full situation analysis can help a company make the best choices:

• it will help you understand what’s important to your customers (like, for instance, support for American farmers and all the associated industries)
• it will help ensure you have a full appreciation for the activities of the group you’re supporting (and who their opponents are likely to be), and their impacts on your customers

Industry journal Pork re-printed [yellow tail]’s response to a request for comment from sister publication Bovine Veterinarian magazine; it includes the following:

"We’ve listened to your recent feedback and it was very helpful to us – in fact it prompted us to specifically choose the areas where we’d most like to celebrate animals. Here’s what we’ve decided: We’ll still honor our monetary commitment to the HSUS, but now we are specifically directing our $100,000 donation to HSUS’ Animal Rescue Team, which launch on-the-ground missions to rescue animals in peril. The HSUS Animal Rescue Team is a leading disaster response agency for animals, contributing millions of dollars to rebuild animal shelters destroyed in natural disasters, responding to floods, fires, and other disasters.

We may not always agree with 100 percent of what an organization represents, but rescuing animals displaced from natural disasters is a cause we support."

I’m certain [yellow tail]’s support for the HSUS was pledged with the best of intentions; as they learned, though, sometimes the best of intentions aren’t quite enough.

Would you buy these shorts?

I spent the last couple of weeks on vacation, culminating in a great 3-day weekend with my sister at the Rogers Cup Masters tennis tournament in Montreal. The tennis was excellent, the weather cooperated, and the tournament organizers did an outstanding job. Had it not been for this pair of shorts, my blog post about the tournament would’ve been about how the organizers should give master-classes in running a smooth – and fun – event.

But I couldn’t ignore these shorts.

These are Nike shorts, worn by one of the top 10 men’s tennis players in the world. We noted that at least one other player wore the same shorts – in black – but because of their dark colour, they didn’t create the same “issue”.

It was very hot in Montreal last week, and this is a high-performance athlete. But while everyone expects a professional athlete to sweat, no-one wants to wear shorts that show sweat like this.

Sports apparel companies like Nike spend millions sponsoring and outfitting professional athletes across the sporting world, in the hopes that seeing their clothes and equipment on those athletes will build brand loyalty among their legions of fans. It’s a smart strategy, and has delivered customers for decades.
But as this pair of shorts shows, a sponsor company shouldn’t just send off the wardrobe, pay the sponsorship fees and leave it at that. It should watch to ensure the clothing is doing its job for both the athlete and the company: that is, making them both look good.

I have questions about the product itself – shouldn’t athletic clothing be designed to avoid this? Even if these were “extraordinary” circumstances, though, a Nike rep should have seen that these shorts weren’t right for the conditions the first time the player wore them, and hustled up new (dark coloured) pairs before the next match. If worst came to worst, there was a pro shop on the grounds of the tournament – someone could have gone over there with a credit card and bought some new shorts for the player if that’s what it had to come to. But there’s no way this poor guy should have been out there, day after day, in the blazing sun with shorts that looked like this.

It must have been embarrassing for the player; but for my money, Nike’s the one that came out looking bad. It’s an enormous global brand – but after this tournament, I’m sure many of us who attended the Rogers Cup (and who watched it on ESPN, TSN, RDS and other channels that may have been covering the event) have doubts about how they test their fabrics… and may be a little hesitant to pick up the next pair of coloured Nike shorts that catches our eye.

Execution is great – but follow-through is just as important. When managing any kind of event or sponsorship that goes beyond single-hit exposure, it’s just as important to watch and manage the third, or seventh, or hundredth exposure as it is the first.