WAW: Accenture — Tiger Woods Campaign
jtherkal: With the whole Arthur-Anderson-renamed-Accenture sneaky marketing move gone and all but forgotten, Accenture has moved on to further disgrace themselves by creating terrible ads. I see the logic they’re using: Tiger Woods is good at golf, businessmen like golf, so let’s put Tiger and golf and business together. Their line “Go on, be a Tiger” makes me throw up in my mouth, and the new line “We know what it takes to be a Tiger” is almost as bad. They force fit their message clumsily into images of Tiger golfing, resulting in an embarassing, pun-filled, hack-job campaign.
The only redeeming value is that this campaign gave birth to one of my favorite advertising stories. I know two of the creatives who were unfortunate enough to work on it. Unhappy as they were to be strapped with the assignment of writing terrible lines to go with pictures of Tiger golfing, they gave it the old college try. During their work, they noticed that a lot of the headlines bought by the client sounded like they came right from fortune cookies. So they went down to Chinatown and bought a bag of 200 fortune cookies, cracked them open and started to pick out the fortunes that might work as lines. They presented the list of lines to their creative director, who thought they were BRILLIANT. The lines sold and now, in the archives of Accenture ads, you can find some fortune cookie gems. I was in the airport one day and saw one that was clearly a result of their efforts, which read “At first, all great tasks seem impossible.” Like doing a good ad for this campaign, I imagine. F.
sjbooher: True confessions: I love puns. True confessions part II: I have no idea why this is so bad. Seems fine to me. Simply including the stills and clips of Tiger is probably a win… and then they didn’t get too over-the-top with “we’re so witty” copy — just simple puns and quotes that don’t detract from the message: “Be the best in the world at what you do, come to us”. Overly creative? No. Will it win any awards at some holier-than-thou ad awards ceremony? Apparently not. Will business people like a company associated with Tiger? Yes. C.
Tags: accenture, fortune cookies, go on be a tiger, Tiger Woods, we know what it takes to be a tiger