Hating the Nike Tiger ad

Swoosh!

OK, everybody, had enough time to let "last week's" TV spot simmer for awhile?

Embodying the high moral standards that American advertising has come to represent (“Sincerity and honesty, back seat please”), this tumor recently appeared on-air and fired-up several petitioners enough to make almost-instant submissions to H4H. (At least two of them, alas, have labored long in the service of marketing communications, so they well know whereof they speak.)

To wit: “That Nike commercial was so ridiculous. It's a piece o' shit as an ad and it's also laughable: Like his horndog father is his moral compass? The old man was a notorious womanizer and now he's Yoda?

“It's just more of the same ('I can screw everybody…without penalty') from the whole entitled crew: political, corporate, Wall Street, banking, sports, celebs, clergy, not to mention the media machine that keeps enabling this behavior while piously decrying it. Worst of all, it forces me, once again, to face my shaudenfreude habit. I HATE that!”

Another ad veteran laments: “I wasn't sure it was possible to dislike Nike anymore than I did, but the Tiger commercial might be the creepiest thing I've ever seen.

“As if it weren't bad enough that Nike pays some kid who can play great basketball $90 million to be its public face while it pays the kids who stitch together the shoes 90 cents a day, now they've really outdone themselves with the newest commercial starring a dead guy and his philandering son.”

Wait, folks. She’s just warming up. “Everyone should stop pretending he's coming back from battle, or that he's overcome some life-threatening illness. He's been caught up in a completely self-inflicted nightmare brought on by his own selfishness…made even creepier by bringing back his dead father to lecture him -- and pretending it's some touching father-son moment. It's gross!”

The wrap-up: “Tiger, if you wanted to impress people on the father-son front, you should have kept it in your pants and stayed home with your actual son once in awhile.”

Sing it, sister! (And this bride-to-be is from Maine, well-versed in “the way life should be.”)

On top of it all (shudder!), we don’t even think the spot is “world class.” So, if the many spoofs of the Nike ad don't do it for you, we offer for your palate-cleansing refreshment this agenda-free classic from the H4H archives. Forty years old and still as fresh as ever. With none of that icky moral aftertaste.



Nike Tiger ad:
Officially registered at Hate for Hire, April 18, 2010.