Jacques Patrick

Ashley Humphries

ENC 1101

28 March 2015

Exposing The Tiger Woods Ad

Tiger woods is arguably the best golfer of all-time. He has won countless of Major golf

championship’s throughout his career, made over a billion dollars in earnings, and was regarded

as the Number one Golf player in the world in the world for a long period of time. He was named

the world’s most powerful athlete multiple times by Forbes.com, so that probably could tell you

he was a high character guy and many people looked up to him. He was endorsed by almost

everyone from Nike, EA Sports, Gatorade, Gillette, and many more top notch companies.   One

night though an incident occurred and changed many people’s perception on Tiger as a person.

         Thanksgiving of 2009 a car accident occurred outside of the house of tiger woods home

that left him unconscious. Police, ambulance, and countless of media outlets flooded the scene to

see what could of went wrong with the almost perfect Tiger Woods. As everybody started to try

and uncover what happen things started to seem kind of sketchy because the accident report

wasn't released until twelve hours after the actual crash happened. This made many people feel

like there was more to the story considering the fact that two days prior to the accident the

“National Enquirer published a story alleging that Woods had been seeing a New York night

club hostess, and that they recently were together in Melbourne, where Woods competed in the

Australian Masters.” This was the beginning of what would be a nightmare of months for tiger

woods, he lost endorsement deals, he couldn't play golf because of the injuries he received from

the crash, and his yearly income dropped from 75 million a year to 58 million a year. Then when

thinking things couldn't get any worse for tiger they did. Tiger’s wife Elin Nordegren filed for

divorce after multiple women came forward about affairs they had with Tiger. People knew

Tiger ways were too good to be true.

        Nike is a multi-billion dollar company so anything they produce or promote gets plenty of

attention. The purpose and point behind many of Nike’s ads are that if you wear their product

you can become a superior athlete. They do this by getting the top athletes from each sport to

wear their product and Nike did this with Tiger Woods, basically saying winning is everything

when it comes to Nike.

      In the original ad it seems that Nike wanted to emphasize on the fact that winning is

everything and everything else comes after that. I say this because Winning is the first word in

their statement and everything is the last word, which is something I say they did on purpose.

This isn't the right thing for a company such as Nike to promote because it's very misleading and

untrue. I say this because basically the message I interpreted, was that as long as you're excelling

at your sport you can do whatever you want and it won't catch up to you unless you start losing. 

I did pick up on something else however and that was the color red Nike used in their original

Ad. I believe Nike used the color red because they knew Woods had lost many fans due to the

fact that he had cheated on his wife that he had several kids with. So when Woods

started winning again he became more of the villain opposed to the hero everybody used to

consider him. So the red Nike used was fitting for the picture because red is usually associated

with the villains.

     This ad was very intriguing to me because I'm an athlete and I don't agree with the message

Nike is trying to portray. People nowadays tend to think that when an athlete is at the top of their

sport, athletes think they are invincible and get full of them because they think everybody bows

down to them as if they are a king. I’m exposing that fact that Nike is okay with the perception

that Big time athletes get, once they have one mess up during their career as long as their

excelling and making the Nike brand money. 

       In my anti-ad I decided I wanted to uncover what Nike and Tiger Woods really meant in the

original ad Nike released when they displayed a picture of Tiger Woods saying “Winning Takes

Care of Everything.” The original picture for the ad did not really serve me justice for the

message I wanted to present so I switched the picture. With this new picture I used a image of

Woods giving a slight grin with his finger going horizontally over his lip with the text “Winning

gave me a clean slate.” This is what I think Nike really meant in their original ad because now

tiger woods is again regarded as the number one player in the world, and he's back to being the

top athlete in the world so everybody is now silent about his past miscues from a few years ago

due to his success again.

       In my anti-ad I was really aiming to expose what Nike really was portraying in the original

ad and everything it stood for with the message and image of Tiger Woods. Tiger woods is a

great golfer but just because he’s a great golfer doesn't mean people should brush away the fact

that he has flaws and that he did some terrible things in his past. That is why I changed the

picture in my anti-ad to an image of him grinning with his finger going horizontally across his

mouth as if he telling you to be quiet. This was a technique I thought was important in the

message I was trying to use in my anti-ad because it supported, what I was saying when I said

Woods latest success silenced his past slip ups. I did keep the red bold “world #1” text because I

believe even though tiger woods is successful again in some people's eyes he is a villain and can't

be forgiven.

      I wanted my message in my anti-ad to be directed towards any Nike consumers because I feel

they deserved way better than this considering how much Nike product cost. I feel it was outright

wrong for them to promote that message to its consumers because not only do people my age

buy and keep up with Nike products, young kids do to and I feel that's not a positive thing to use

one of the world’s most powerful athletes to send a message like this. I feel my writing was very

persuasive because I went into detail about every little thing when it came to exposing this ad. I

uncovered the smallest of lies and exposed it with the truth, whether it was from the wording of

the text or the color used in the image I feel I exposed it all. For example I went into detail about

how Nike put winning first in their original ad and everything last to kind of deem the fact that

winning is all that matters and everything else comes last. Small stepping stones like that are

what allows me to feel my writing is persuasive in the message I'm trying to give.

     In this writing I had a lot of issues expanding on certain topics. It was hard for me to just

breakdown every little detail about why I did this and why I changed that. If this would've been a

writing where I could just talk about one thing and expand on it, then I feel things would've went

a lot smoother for me. I can recall in one part in my writing as I was following the checklist of

the things I should include In my writing, I got to one thing on the checklist and it asked me what

I was aiming to do with my anti-ad. I knew what I was aiming to do with my anti-ad but it was

something I could not expand on and write four to five sentences about. That was most of the

problems I had when writing this paper but if I had to write it all over the only thing I would

change is the structure of the paper. What I mean when I say this is, I feel like I tried to align my

writing just as the checklist asked even though we didn't have to follow the whole checklist. I felt

that following the checklist was the only way I would meet the word count on this paper and

have a quality paper doing so.