Technology & Finance
Accenture’s Tiger vs. AFLAC’s Duck
When you’re in a business selling abstract stuff, designing a marketing campaign is a challenge. Accenture, which provides high –priced consultancy, outsourcing and body shopping—turned to Tiger Woods.
AFLAC, which offers a similarly virtual product—personal insurance sold through employers, turned to a white duck which splutters through otherwise oddly prosaic telescripts squawking “AFFFLLLLAAAK.” Or something like that.
The now obvious advantage to a duck as your spokesman is it rarely hits the tabloids with drug or sex scandals. And if the duck does become difficult, the bird could always be tossed into the cook pot and replaced with another white bundle of feathers. Only its handler would ever know.
But when you have built an ad campaign around a highly successful golfer, replete with slogans such as “Go on, be a Tiger!” it’s time to move on. (For a gallery of unfortunate Tiger adverts, from Gatorade to Nike (Just Do It) to Gillette (The best a man can get) see the Daily Beast.
For Accenture, this might have proven the best way to kill off a promo campaign that had grown almost as stale as the HSBC local knowledge posters that bore passengers in jetways around the world.
But the fallout may have been pretty expensive for the companies which contracted with Woods.
Researchers Victor Stango and Christopher Knittel at the University of California, estimated the damage to the market value of Woods’ main sponsors by looking at stock market returns for the 13 trading days after November 27 when the Woods story began to surface.
“The study looked at sponsors of Tiger Woods for which stock prices were available, in several cases through quoted prices for the parent companies.
“Sponsors included: Accenture; AT&T; Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf (Electronic Arts); Gillette (Proctor and Gamble); Nike; Gatorade (PepsiCo); TLC Laser Eye Centers.
The report carried a caution that this kind of statistical study might have a ‘particularly large’ margin of error because many sponsors were subsidiaries of larger quoted companies.”
As good economists, they have taken advantage of the news scarcity factor – the period between Christmas and New Year’s is the slowest of the year—to release their study. And since they are economists, rather than stock experts, they don’t say anything about the low volumes and spiky volatility of stock markets in this period either.
Still, their report might warn off senior management – do they really want to face shareholder lawsuits because their celebrity spokesperson ran off with the yacht captain, was photographed doing lines of coke, or suffered a personal video leakage to the Internet?
Perhaps we will see new campaigns built around animals, robots, or animated figures in the year ahead. As AFLAC has demonstrated, with the right agency even a duck can be eye-catching. And safe.