Intriguing thinking on Nike's part

Anybody who's seen Nike's new ad featuring Tiger Woods can immediately sense its unconventional marketing approach.  The commercial features narration by Woods' late father Earl, whose vocal likeness to his son's is unmistakable, and uses the parental figure to allude to both the golfer's very public indiscretions and his psychological makeup.

It's a reverse tactic on Nike's part.  In many ways, the ad further exploits Woods' behaviour as a means to promote, well, Tiger Woods.  It's also shrewd and well played, since Woods' currency as a 'refined' public personality -  his past life -  has run out.   It'll be interesting to see how the public responds to it.  To me, it's engineered to a tee; not unlike the material promoting Woods before his legendary public meltdown.  "Woods the man" has always been controlled and calculated, much in the way that "Woods the professional golfer" has taken to the links.  His public persona has always been manicured.  What this commercial makes abundantly clear is that press conferences with the crying, confessions and hugging (of sponsor representatives!!!) are very much part of the act as well.  It started with the shirtless tough guy photographs that Annie Leibowitz took of Woods for Vanity Fair, produced prior to the debacle and released afterward, and takes us to this point with Nike.   Good times or bad, Woods will remain a sculpted figure in the media, it is who he is.   

Neo-Nazi Afrikan Group fires warning shot at World Cup 2010

Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging logo

 Eugene Terreblanche

As promised, problems have already begun for World Cup 2010 organizers as The Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), a South African White-Supremacist group formed in the 70s, is threatening racial violence at the tournament after their leader Eugene Terreblanche was murdered.  Terreblanche formed the group in reaction to former South African Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster's liberal views.  Strangely, Johannes was pro-Apartheid.  I guess Terreblanche was seeking a more visceral control of the state from the country's leadership post.