Nike Golf launched a massive, new ad campaign today the company hopes will jumpstart sales for the struggling division. The ads, centered on the tagline "I Am Not Tiger Woods", will focus on how absolutely no one — of any age, gender or color — would want to be like Tiger Woods in any way.
"He's getting divorced, he's losing millions of dollars, he has terrible taste in women, he's bald, he likes crap music, he is arrogant, he's a liar and now he sucks at golf," said Nike Golf president Cindy Davis. "There's pretty much not a single positive thing about Tiger Woods. So we wanted to capture his pathetic essence in an ad and latch onto the public's desire to be pretty much the opposite of Tiger Woods."
The new campaign signals a bit of a shift from past Nike Golf ad campaigns that sold Tiger Woods as the ideal.
"Yeah, things have kind of changed a bit with him over the past year," said Davis. "For example, a year ago I never could have imagined that I would beat Tiger Woods at the company golf tournament. But I did. By 12 strokes."
The ads will also save Nike significant money due to low production costs. The ads are just clips from news stories about Tiger Woods, interspersed with his worst shanks from the 2010 PGA season. The ads close with the "I Am Not Tiger Woods" tagline and a Nike swoosh symbol.
"We put our best creative minds on this campaign, but they quickly realized there was no way they could trump the reality of Tiger Woods," said Davis. "His all-encompassing failure at life is beyond imagination."
The new campaign dovetails nicely with Nike Golf's long-running "I Am Not Michelle Wie" campaign.
