We all saw the ad: Tiger Woods stares stoically and misty eyed into the camera in his usual Nike apparel.  The voice of Earl Woods, Tiger’s late father, questions him about his infamous adulterous escapades.  “Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion,” Earl Woods says. “I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. Did you learn anything?”

Talk about powerful advertising.  Nike is a company that sells sports gear, but this commercial is proof of just how far advertisers in our culture have come from simply selling products.  For years, Tiger Woods has been the face of Nike, establishing a fiscally beneficial situation for both parties, who grew into a kind of comfortable codependence.  Tiger was able to finance his yacht (or whatever it is celebrity billionaires do with the cash from their endorsements) and Nike was able to capitalize on an athlete whose talent on the golf course was matched only by his squeaky clean image.  Tiger was a marketer’s dream, and Nike amassed the revenue to prove it.

Nike sold Tiger’s image just as much as his short game and swoosh-embossed polos; he was a family man to be revered for his unwavering morals.  In the face of the past and present multitude of adulterous athletes who still received millions in product endorsements after their transgressions (think Kobe Bryant), Tiger Woods was a wholesome breath of fresh air.  As a company, endorsing Tiger Woods meant representing his personal life, which at the time, was all about the values of our country.  Or so it appeared.

Did consumers buy Nike products partially because they believed that Nike was a company with a similar set of values to their own?  I’m guessing the marketers at Nike have heard of value segmentation, and targeting consumers who placed high value on family or who admired Tiger Woods for both his professional career and admirable personal life wasn’t a coincidence.  Tiger Woods was a figure whose life was consistent with Nike consumers’ values, or so it seemed.  When the Tiger scandal hit the media, the endorsers who had made him the most highly paid athlete in the world were faced with the big decision: damage control or exit stage right.

Several of Tiger’s endorsers did in fact choose to bow out, deeming his reputation irreparably damaged.  But not Nike.  Nike’s response to the scandal was this commercial, which in one thirty second spot repositioned Tiger as a living commentary on our society’s changing values.  Instead of marking him with a letter “A” and writing him off as another professional athlete turned modern day Hester Prynn, Nike did what they do best: emblazoned their famous logo on their fallen spokesman and used the media to cleverly redefine him as a man who needed his father to help him through a difficult time in his life.  Nike battled the public’s critique of Tiger’s tainted family values with the ultimate trump card- more family values.  The only way Nike could continue to endorse Tiger, who at that point was so ingrained in the culture of their brand image and company that dropping him would mean redirecting efforts towards an enormous and risky counter-campaign, was to fight fire with fire.

The question remains: did Nike make the right choice?  Was this commercial just about the money, and saving face?  Or does it speak to our culture’s values at large?  In spite of his egregious transgressions, Nike supports Tiger Woods.  Advertising as an industry now carries a lot of social responsibility that it never did before, possibly because agencies now brand their image with meaning beyond simply functions of the product they’re selling.  No matter what, Nike’s decision was going to make a statement, and the impact of the decision and the ad are unmistakable.  Instead of changing their spokesman to an athlete who was a better representation of their values, Nike changed their values, and attempted to change ours as well.  Did we fall for it?  Like I said: talk about powerful advertising.