By TIM ARANGO
Published: December 13, 2009
Accenture, the giant consulting firm, ended its six-year marketing relationship with Tiger Woods on Sunday, showing once again that in advertising as in sports, there are no sure things.
Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press
In February 2009, Tiger Woods played in a golf tournament sponsored by Accenture, a giant consulting company that chose the golfer as the face of its brand.
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Mr. Woods had been featured in Accenture campaigns with the tagline, “Go On. Be a Tiger,” splashed in business magazines and airport waiting rooms since 2003. Since most consumers have no idea what a company like Accenture does, Mr. Woods became the human face of the corporation and a means to extol the corporate virtues of performance and risk-taking.
In a statement Sunday, the company said Mr. Woods, 34, was “no longer the best representative” for its advertising. The action came more than two weeks after a bizarre car accident involving Mr. Woods, who is married, led to a series of embarrassing revelations about affairs he has carried on with other women. Then on Friday he announced that he was taking a hiatus from golf.
Accenture is the first of Mr. Woods’s many sponsors to withdraw its support completely. Gillette has said that it would remove its Woods-related advertising for now and other sponsors, like AT&T, PepsiCo and Nike, have said they will wait to see when and how Mr. Woods returns to golf before making any permanent decisions. EA Sports, which has a line of best-selling Tiger Woods video games, is also standing by the golf star.
In response to Accen
ture’s announcement, Mark Steinberg, Mr. Woods’s agent, said, “We are disappointed but respect their decision.”
Accenture’s decision is another example of how risky it can be for corporations to base their marketing efforts on individual celebrities in an age when blogs, camera phones and the digital footprint left by the celebrities themselves can quickly expose their foibles to the world.
Earlier this year, Kellogg dropped its sponsorship of Michael Phelps, the gold-medal swimmer, after he was photographed using a bong at a party, saying, in language similar to Accenture’s, that his acts were not “consistent with the image of Kellogg.” In 2003, Nutella and McDonald’s ended their deals with Kobe Bryant after he was accused of sexual assault in Colorado; the charges were eventually dropped.
Among corporate pitchmen, however, Mr. Woods is unique. He dominates a sport for individuals that is marketed around the world while still being hugely popular in the United States, in contrast to sports like tennis.
More than any other athlete, Mr. Woods has built a billion-dollar brand around himself that has not only benefited him but has also made millions of dollars for his sponsors. Perhaps the best analogy for Mr. Woods’s predicament is not another athlete but Martha Stewart — another example of a billion-dollar brand based on the cultivated image of one person.
Ms. Stewart put her public company and television contracts at risk when she was convicted of lying to prosecutors about a minor stock deal. She emerged from her five-month sentence in prison to retake the reins at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, but the company has not returned to the financial heights it once enjoyed.
“Tiger is the best example of a walking, individual corporation,” said Ben Porritt, a public relations executive who advised Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees third baseman, last spring after his onetime steroid use was disclosed.
“Tiger is going to come out of this as somewhat of a bankrupt brand,” said Mr. Porritt. “He will have to restructure and go forward.” But, he said, “It’s going to be an ugly few months.”
Several companies that measure consumer reaction believe the ugliness has already started. Zeta Interactive, a digital ad agency that monitors message boards, blogs and social media posts, said that positive sentiment toward Mr. Woods had already plummeted. Before the accident, buzz about the golfer was 91 percent positive; by Friday, that figure had sunk to 43 percent.
The turnabout “is the quickest fall from positive to negative we’ve ever seen,” said Al DiGuido, chief executive at Zeta Interactive.
The Nielsen IAG unit of the Nielsen Company found that the accident quickly affected the brands Mr. Woods peddles. There were more than 20 instances through Monday, Dec. 7, of jokes being made on late-night talk shows that paired Mr. Woods with one of his sponsors by name, according to Nielsen IAG.
The recall among viewers of the brand mentioned in the joke was 55 percent, according to Nielsen IAG, compared with a norm in late-night shows of 39 percent.
About 11 percent of those viewers who recalled a brand with ties to Mr. Woods said they had a negative opinion of the brand, Nielsen IAG reported, compared with the average negative opinion of a brand mentioned in a late-night show of 6 percent.
David Arluck, an independent sports marketing executive, said that Accenture was in a different spot than other sponsors because it pitched a service to businesses, not consumers, and so it had centered its branding on Mr. Woods’s persona.
“In business, credibility means a lot and honesty means a lot, and Accenture wants to be a company that can be trusted,” he said. “Obviously Tiger Woods did some things that betrayed the trust of people who were close to him, and I can see how they would want to distance themselves from that.”
Even the most upright athletes seem to be aware of the tenuousness of image in the Internet age. On a recent evening in Manhattan, the Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter — a close friend of Mr. Woods — stood on a dais after receiving Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year award and was asked, essentially, how he was able to enjoy the perks of athletic superstardom for so many years and maintain his pitch-perfect image.
“Don’t jinx me,” Mr. Jeter said, to nervous laughter.
Ian Austen, Larry Dorman, Stuart Elliott and Stephanie Clifford contributed reporting.
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