IMG And The Art Of Public Relations

Reader Don emailed about Tiger's PR offensive as his car accident anniversary arrives and Don reminds me of a theme we visited several times during the heyday of the crisis: IMG is unbelievably terrible at image building.

"Offensive being the operative word," was how Don put it:

In this whole 12 month saga, the biggest shocker for me is how poorly IMG has handled any sort of remedial PR campaigns.

There was the argument early on (and likely valid) that Woods may be intractable and that's why things moved so slowly or clumsily.

But we're long past that point now. The IMG people are just flat out crappy at this.

This latest salvo is (bad) textbook: A highly orchestrated (read: cynical, calculated) attack that's going to last about 3 days. Just enough to get the attention of anyone who's the slightest bit jaundiced in their view of the guy and way too limited in scope to sway the public at large.

I guess the use of Newsweek was any attempt to broaden the reach, but the timing was hilarious. Already a moribund entity, there was the merge/takeover thing with The Daily Beast at the start of the week. My understanding is the Newsweek website didn't even exist for 24 hours or so. You went there, you got redirected to The Daily Beast site. Then there was a hue and cry from the dozen or so loyal Newsweek readers and the site got resuscitated.

Deadspin nailed the analysis of today's silly ESPN radio interview which instead of helping Tiger's image just made people feel like nothing much has changed.