Tiger Woods - Part 1

To update those who have been under a rock... Tiger Woods has been cheating on his wife.

So what, right? This is a music marketing blog.

And that's why we're going to talk about marketing...specifically the marketing of dating site AshleyMadison.com.

Watch this...

You see, Ashley Madison is a site which caters who married people who want to have an affair.  And since Tiger has been cheating on his wife, he's the perfect guy to be its spokesperson.

That's why Ashley Madison has offered Tiger $5,000,000 to do the job.

Brilliant!

No way in hell is Tiger Woods going to do this job for $5,000,000.  For one, that's not that much money to him.  Plus, he'd likely lose much larger endorsements due to "ethics" clauses, which all endorsements carry these days to allow companies to get out of big payouts when situations just like this one happen.

The people at Ashley Madison know this, so they issue a press release making the offer and kick back, watching all the free publicity they're getting.

This isn't anything new and it happens all the time.  In 1984, Gillette reportedly offered Billy Gibbons and and Dusty Hill of ZZ Top $1,000,000 each to shave their beards for a television commercial.  Larry Flynt does similar offers for celebrities to appear nude in his magazine.

The point isn't to get the endorsement, the commercial, or the pictorial; the point is to get people talking...and that's exactly what it does.

Have you ever done something outrageous to get media attention?  Post it below...

Comments

[brett at detone8]

lol
I never though of asking someone to be a spokes person just to get publicity. It's really smart. I'm going to have to steal that idea.

[Keith Mohr]

David, a few years back my Indieheaven.com organization gave away $20,000 to one of our members to record an album with a well known Christian music producer. Its was a no strings attached scholarship, and my marketing angle was that we signed a band to stay indie. I promoted the you know what out of it and our membership to Indieheaven increased over 300% and we made our money back and then some. It was a neat experiment to see if we could create some buzz and do some good. It worked.

[Dan B]

Not me personally, but the Balloon Boy scandal seems worth talking about here. It all happened in the town I'm from, Fort Collins CO. The family who told news crews their son was floating all over the state in a bizarre balloon when he was in the attic the whole time. Just for the publicity. oops.