Anyone think the media might be enjoying the Tiger Woods scandal?
The boss of Yahoo certainly seems to be.
“God bless Tiger,” Carol Bartz told a media conference in New York.
The Tiger story has been driving traffic on every part of the site, she said.
“This week we got a huge uplift: front page, news, sports, gossip. He just filtered through the whole place.
And, then, she said this:
“It is better than Michael Jackson dying. It is kind of hard to put an ad next to a funeral.”
Even if you admire her candour it hardly seems right to be weighing up the death of one celebrity against the ‘transgressions’ of another.
She may be saying what the whole world thinks, of course.
But the Woods story has been a boon for the usually low-key magazine ‘Beverage Digest’
It was reporting that sports drink maker Gatorade was dropping its ‘Tiger Focus’ line before the golf star hit the headlines (and a fire hydrant).
In the last day or so, media around the world has jumped on the Gatorade decision as some kind of sign of advertisers losing faith in the Tiger brand.
This is despite repeated statements from Gatorade that they made their decision months ago.
Beverage Digest revealed that the reason behind the decision was a 34 per cent drop in sales in the first months of the year.
One interesting line from the Wall Street Journal though. Research has shown that advertisers have been holding off showing Tiger ads on TV since the scandal broke.