In Defense of Public Relations

I may be a couple of days late with this post, but I have a good excuse. One I’m not on deadline and two there were way too many events going on in the world the past two days for me to even care about what Tiger Woods has to say about his shenanigans the last four months.

It also took me more than a day to digest Tiger Woods’ first two media interviews with ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi and The Golf Channel’s Kelly Tilghman. Neither will be winning a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism in the future. Both reporters (if you want to call them that) showed a lot of restraint and avoided asking the tough questions. In fact, it is obvious Kelly is the queen of Tiger Woods’ media groupie. Still, you can’t solely place the blame on them though. With only five minutes allotted per interview, there’s no way any journalist could have been able to ask the hard questions, and if they did, Tiger would have needed more than five minutes to respond. Let’s put it this way. Tiger’s caddy, Steve Williams, could have stood in for him and we wouldn’t have known the difference.

So what was this exclusive 5-minute press junket about? It was about one thing. PUBLICITY. Since Tiger’s PR has been consistently duffing lately, I’m guessing Ari Fleischer had something to do with this before he resigned his services from the Tiger camp.

It was a clever PR move really. Tiger needed to get in front of the corporations/brands that have dropped him like a two-foot putt to woo them back as well as be seen by other brands that are seeking an endorser. There were two key messages he delivered during the interviews and he pounded these repeatedly in five minutes:

1) Tiger’s personal life is back in order

2) Tiger’s ready to play golf.

Oh there was a third, Buddhism is the answer to a chaotic life…and with that Tiger Woods exits (still wearing his “TW” logo cap and Nike apparel).

P.S. Jim Furyk did win his first golf tournament in two and a half years. Unfortunately, it ended up as a post-script on media outlets.

I just love it when celebrities inadvertently get brands media exposure for free. You just can’t buy that kind of publicity.

Take for example the Lindsay Lohan $100 million lawsuit against E-Trade’s TV ad that references the name, “Lindsay,” in the commercial. I’m not an ad guy as you know, I’m a prdude, but that E-Trade ad, in my opinion, was mediocre at best. It won’t be winning at the Cannes Ad Festival or taking home an Addy (though I could be wrong–again not my area of expertise).

What I’m trying to say is simply this, there are other E-Trade ads that are much funnier and entertaining than the one that got the ire of one Lindsay Lohan. With Lindsay’s multimillion dollar lawsuit, it made the ad bigger than what it could ever have been. I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes the one E-Trade ad folks will remember in the years to come. It might just achieve cult status among consumers. All thanks to a celebrity that initially showed good-natured personality (judging by her tweets after the ad initially aired during the last Super Bowl), but turned out to be easily influenced by those around her. That could be why she was in and out of rehab–she succumbs to peer pressure.

The only winner here will be E-Trade, and to no surprise, the lawyers.”Milka-what?”