17/02: Can your customers get involved with your marketing?
After sitting on the runway during the ice storm for what seemed like an eternity (my friend and I emptied the first class cabin of their Scotch before we even left the runway) I landed safely in sunny Florida. I am here in Tampa to play in a Pro-Am golf tournament with Curtis Strange. I won this at a charity event of Curtis’ last year. Well I should say that Curtis won it for me. At the benefit, Curtis was sitting next to me and kept pushing my hand up in the air when someone else outbid me. He was having quite a laugh with it, and it was for a good cause, so I played along and enjoyed the evening.
The pro-am was at the TPC Tampa in, you guessed it, Tampa. Curtis and I played with a couple of other guys who also won spots through other charity events. The one guy pulled out some Nike Juice Golf Balls and handed me one to try on the final hole. He said “Be careful with this, I’ve seen what they can do to a ice sculpture, and it aint pretty.”
I was expecting a story about an errant golf ball and a ruined wedding, but that wasn’t the case. It turns out he learned about this golf ball from an email sent to him by a friend. The email was asking him to vote between having a golf ball crush a jar of mayonnaise or a jello mold. The email sent him to the Nike site: http://www.nike.com/nikegolf/juiceball.
We fired up the site on his PDA back in the clubhouse. This site has authentic looking footage from a testing lab where two guys fire the Nike Juice golf ball into various household items. A crowd formed around us as we watched the ball fly through these items in slow motion. It was very captivating!
At the bottom of the web page, it offered two items to choose between for what would be next on the firing line. I thought this was a brilliant idea. Not only was I engaged by the video and wanted to see if my preferred item was annihilated, I immediately fired off an email to my golfing buddy list, enlisting their support in my campaign for what would be next. Now each of them went to the Nike site and cast their own vote, possibly enlisting others. I called Phil Knight that night to commend him on it.
Well, back to the round of golf with Strange here in Tampa. I teed up the Juice ball on the final tee and swung away with a swing that would make Happy Gilmore proud. While an ice sculpture may be no match for the ball, we soon discovered that a beer cart is a worthy opponent as my shot caromed off the roof and went into the lake. Curtis laughed so hard that he fell out of our cart.
The pro-am was at the TPC Tampa in, you guessed it, Tampa. Curtis and I played with a couple of other guys who also won spots through other charity events. The one guy pulled out some Nike Juice Golf Balls and handed me one to try on the final hole. He said “Be careful with this, I’ve seen what they can do to a ice sculpture, and it aint pretty.”
We fired up the site on his PDA back in the clubhouse. This site has authentic looking footage from a testing lab where two guys fire the Nike Juice golf ball into various household items. A crowd formed around us as we watched the ball fly through these items in slow motion. It was very captivating!
At the bottom of the web page, it offered two items to choose between for what would be next on the firing line. I thought this was a brilliant idea. Not only was I engaged by the video and wanted to see if my preferred item was annihilated, I immediately fired off an email to my golfing buddy list, enlisting their support in my campaign for what would be next. Now each of them went to the Nike site and cast their own vote, possibly enlisting others. I called Phil Knight that night to commend him on it.
Well, back to the round of golf with Strange here in Tampa. I teed up the Juice ball on the final tee and swung away with a swing that would make Happy Gilmore proud. While an ice sculpture may be no match for the ball, we soon discovered that a beer cart is a worthy opponent as my shot caromed off the roof and went into the lake. Curtis laughed so hard that he fell out of our cart.
