Nike airs embarrassing new Tiger Woods TV spot
"Using the out-of-context words of your dead father in an attempt to clean up your image just might be more offensive than nailing dozens of hookers across the U.S. while your wife raises your kid." —Jason Piroth, 4/8/10
Here's the new Nike spot from Wieden + Kennedy that broke Wednesday ahead of Tiger Woods 's return at the Masters. It's pretty cringeworthy. It shows Tiger Woods soberly looking into the camera, as you hear his late father Earl. "I want to find out what your thinking was," Earl says. "I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything?" It's comical that Nike is now sponsoring Woods's atonement , which of course cheapens it—and then you throw Earl Woods into the mix, and it cheapens him, too. Woods isn't the devil, but he did embarrass himself and his sport—did they consider maybe not packaging that into a stylish and "meaningful" 30-second sales pitch? For all his talk about being more humble, this ad shows that Woods hasn't changed, and explains a lot about how he got himself in so much trouble in the first place.
On CBS 's The Early Show this morning, Adweek critic Barbara Lippert offered her take on Wieden's new Nike ad with Tiger Woods. For Barbara, the commercial is "powerful, creepy and cynical, but it does what Nike needed to do."
