An American Lion

A rather poor reprint of a Tiger Woods ad for Accenture

There are several things that a pitchman can hawk. He can hawk goods, he can hawk services, and then he can hawk prestige. When you sell your good name, in association with a company that is attempting to link itself to quality, you enter the rarefied air of pitchmen. You sell your good name, plus that of a good company, as a symbol of all that you are. You say, here’s my good name. I’ll let you use it. But you have to have a similar status. Together, we become a symbol of elite accomplishment.

Even though Accenture may not have been the biggest piece of the endorsement pie for Tiger Woods, I would argue that it was the cornerstone of how he marketed himself. Accenture doesn’t sell cars, hats, razors, golf clubs, watches or any of that. Accenture is a $21.5 billion dollar global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company—which isn’t huge, nor is it chump change, but it is an endorsement that added class and prestige to Woods, and it is a company that derived a huge benefit from having Tiger Woods appear in its ads. It created a mutual benefit, as if to say, here’s something reputable that I can endorse because we are both prestigious and elite, and because we are both head and shoulders above everyone else.

Not anymore, however.

Accenture was even classy and honorable in how it dumped Woods, reassuring everyone that it would find someone else, and quickly, to deliver a brand endorsement worthy of the company’s stature:

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) today [SUNDAY, Dec 13] announced that it will not continue its sponsorship agreement with Tiger Woods.

For the past six years, Accenture and Tiger Woods have had a very successful sponsorship arrangement and his achievements on the golf course have been a powerful metaphor for business success in Accenture’s advertising.  However, given the circumstances of the last two weeks, after careful consideration and analysis, the company has determined that he is no longer the right representative for its advertising.  Accenture said that it wishes only the best for Tiger Woods and his family.

Accenture will continue to leverage its “High Performance Business” strategy and “High Performance Delivered” positioning in the marketplace.  The company will immediately transition to a new advertising campaign, with a major effort scheduled to launch later in 2010.

That Accenture would do this deed on a Sunday—traditionally, the day when Tiger would don a red shirt and elegantly win a big money tournament with a deft performance—tells you something about how the company is able to tut tut and walk away from six years of mutual rewards. More power to them. It doesn’t matter if the people at Accenture are all temp agency rejects and slack-jawed public university chumps who can’t wear business casual without looking frumpy. It doesn’t matter if the company is so crooked, no one accepts their third version of events.

Do you know what Woods had to do? He had to be photographed playing golf. That’s it. No fruitless recital of words and memorized catchphrases. He just had to be Tiger. Accenture could then pluck an artsy photo (see above) from some pool of photos and run that, along with a carefully and tastefully worded testimonial as to how wonderful Tiger, and, by association, how wonderful Accenture is. There’s no way you can sell trinkets and baubles with this kind of advertising. This is the voice of the establishment, and no one who isn’t fabulous and of means need trouble yourself about it.

As a client, they were obviously displeased with the shoddy nature of Tiger’s fall. They had to have slapped their foreheads and screamed into their seven hundred dollar entree when pictures of the seventh, eighth, and ninth hardcore porn star surfaced, enhanced boobs and all. This is why the net worth of Tiger Woods has plummeted in recent days. Winning golf tournaments brought in a certain financial reward. But, to suddenly remove years, decades, of future earnings and projected contractual earnings (all now dropped because of subtle “reputation” and “conduct unbecoming” clauses) is to look at Tiger Woods as the billion dollar man who’s now walking around with a name that’s worth fifty bucks, tops, to hawk condom dispensers and sex lubricants on pay-per-view cable.

I would argue that no one—no one—has ever gone from being worth so much to being worth so little faster than Tiger Woods. Not even a Russian oligarch who urinates on the Kremlin floor in front of a thousand pair of eyes can top what Tiger has accomplished since the day after Thanksgiving. This is something that should enter the lexicon. To pull a Tiger, more or less, is to let cheap, unprotected sex with floozies cost you a billion damned dollars. All Tiger would have had to have done is to set aside ten million dollars a year, and call that his honey pot. With the honey pot, he could have set up a bevy of ladies on Mallorca or in Dubai or on his own private Caribbean island for his personal dispensation. Under threat of being cut off, the women would have had to have signed papers not to disclose the nature of their compensation. Businessmen and businesswomen have kept sexual partners quiet in exactly this fashion since Roman times. Probably even before that, except I don’t know. The records don’t go back that far for hotel rooms and apartments.

It’s just the cost of doing business. If you’re a raging sex addict like Tiger, this is what you have to do in order to maintain the facade of having a beautiful wife and beautiful kids and a sterling, billion dollar reputation. You organize and compartmentalize your deviances. I’m sure that someone at Accenture is probably wishing they had sent a person over to see Tiger, to help him maintain his technology and his urges properly.

In short, Tiger forgot to hire himself a whore wrangler. All the great men have whore wranglers. Presidents, Generals, Dictators, even golfers and captains of industry have whore wranglers. They come with the job, to make a South Park pun out of something so basic. Accenture should have procured one for him. This is what you do when you have the means. You hire someone to make sure that these twenty-something mattress ‘hos are kept happy and flush with walking around money.