TW - 15
04.15.19 - Tiger winning his 15th overall Major at the Masters yesterday was truly incredible theatre, unless you’re a crow because there surely must have been a shortage with so many sports talking heads and golf-related “journalists” having a piece.
Great to see Tiger prove all the critics wrong, great to see him be able to celebrate with his mom and kids on 18, and hopefully his health holds up and he can make a serious run at Jack’s record over the next couple of years. But for the focus of this post i want to cover the work that we did for Tiger and his group - UT had the privilege of working with them from 2002-2013 on various projects.
In 2002, Tiger had an official site that was run by CBS Sportsline - Shaq and a few other sports stars were also with them, but the sites were bad, really bad. We reached out to his contacts at IMG and got in touch with Rob McNamara (great partner to work with). At the time we had the Agassi, Sampras, and I believe at least one project for Lance had also been completed so we had some solid work to showcase. They were already planning to do a new site, but asked if we could do a short Flash-based intro for the site, which we gladly took on.
The next project we did for Tiger is one we pitched and what i want to really focus on, and the value of how we came up with the concept is still valuable today - and that project was “The Majors Experience”. When you looked at Tiger’s career at the time there was one part that stood out above all - he had 6 Major wins at the time, was coming off the Tiger Slam (winning 4 consecutively, although not in the same calendar year) and all anybody could talk about was the chase to Jack’s 18 - yes even at 6 it was highly expected 18 was going to get smashed.
This was built-in content, all we had to do was get as creative as possible in showcasing that chase to 18. Too many times people in our industry overlook incredible content possibilities that already exist, and instead try to create and make-up things they hope will resonate.
Social media was non-existent in 2002, and for sports updates you had ESPN and sports websites as your choices. Our challenge was how can we capture the essence of Tiger’s pursuit of Jack, and after some concepting this is what we came up with:
Main Navigation:
-Tiger Update, Majors, Career Grand Slam, Tiger Slam, Major Style
Tiger Update: (Themed to color of the event)
-Tiger Wire: tracked practice rounds and real-time recaps of each day’s round.
-Tiger Quote: quotes from Tiger each day.
-Leaderboard: Top-5 always including Tiger.
-TV Times: Listing of Date/Channel/Time for each day.
-Tiger’s Time: Tee time and playing partner listing for each round.
Majors: (Themed to color of the event, with a sub-section for each of the 4 Majors)
-Listing of dates for that year’s majors, links to 4 Major sections (below), Victory Tracker.
-Tournament Profile: Course history, changes, Victory Tracker and Scorecard.
-Tiger’s Results & Records
-Photo Gallery
Career Grand Slam:
-Section for each of the 5 players to win the Career Grand Slam - Bio, details on wins to the Slam.
-Detailed info for Tiger’s section on each of the events he won to get the Slam.
Tiger Slam:
-Profile (Tiger is the only golfer to hold all 4 Major Titles at the same time)
-Scorecard (all 4 Rounds), and detailed Tournament recap for each of his wins: 00 US Open, 00 British, 00 PGA, 01 Masters.
Major Style:
-Image of each of the Nike polos Tiger would wear during the event, with link to purchase at Nike.com.
The concept had a creative design; content was updated, in-depth, educational, and provided fans a unique offering for the time; and it tied in TW’s biggest sponsor. The success of this project (during it’s shelf-life it was always in the top-2 most visited parts of TW’s official site) allowed us to work on the following projects with Tiger’s Team: Ryder Cup and President’s Cup concepts; Tiger Jam event website; TWLC website; Target World Challenge event website.
It all starts with built-in content, every brand has it just waiting to be showcased:
List out all attributes that make your brand unique.
Deep-dive the attributes and map out complimentary pieces to the story (ie for Tiger and Major play that would be the events/courses, the Career Grand Slam, the Tiger Slam, and the Sunday Red Nike Polo.
Start to concept a content outline and how the experience comes together.
Then creatively build out detailed story experiences around it.
We did this same thing with concepts for Andre Agassi - The Grand Slam, Pete Sampras - Sampras Slam, Lance Armstrong - Yellow, Dale Jr - The Intimidator, Seattle Slew - The Triple Crown, and more. Each concept followed the same formula - creative design; make sure the content is updated, in-depth and educational, and if the fit is right (athlete/team brand specific) tie in a sponsor.
