McIlroy worth his weight in advertising gold

FOR Don Draper, advertising is based on one thing: happiness.

If I know anything about advertising after three scotch-soaked seasons of Mad Men, I know that Madison Avenue’s finest ad man sold a lifestyle to America — not products.

When he needs to flog cereal, he sells the image of the ideal family. Nylon tights are the modern world. Cigarettes become keys to cool.

From adidas execs producing David Beckham virals to fertiliser producers looking to GAA stars in the 1980s, sports stars sell too.

In the States, basketball fans remember a 16-foot shot that a young Michael Jordan sank as a student with the University of Carolina. The kid who would keep sinking them until he became the world’s most recognisable sportsman said afterwards it was the score that “put it him the map”.

His agent meanwhile, perhaps looking at things from a different perspective, remembers the press conference after the game with more fondness. In an article by Henry Louis Gates Jr in the New Yorker magazine, David Falk (“whom one would be tempted to call the Michael Jordan of agents, if he weren’t Michael Jordan’s agent”) recalled a question that MJ slam dunked as a mean-collared 22-year-old.

Jordan had chipped his axe on gold, signing for Coca-Cola. He was made to sit before the world’s cameras in Chicago to hold a few chilled cans of soda, throw some hoops in a shirt-and-tie and perhaps hop some soft-ball questions back to reporters.

But the Atlanta soft drinks company was, at the time, enduring its most turbulent period. New Coke had just been released and its bubbles would not last.

“Hey Mike, which Coke do you like? New Coke or regular Coke?” a journalist shouted at the press conference. The flashes fall dull, the chatter in the room fizzes out.

“Even now,” Gates writes, “Falk wants to make sure I get the full picture: an inexperienced young player, the cameras, the microphones, the blazing lights – and his future as a pitchman in the balance. ‘And Mike responded – hey, Coke is Coke, they both taste great’. As the sportscasters say, nothing but net.”

For Rory McIlroy perhaps that moment came not with a soft drink but through a fog of champagne.

Late in the night after his fourth-round procession at Congressional GC last month, the Holywood lad was pictured — by his own entourage and published on Twitter — drinking deeply from the famous old trophy. But unlike a lot of us perhaps, McIlroy got out of bed mere hours later, travelled north-west to Cape Cod and fulfilled his role as a pitchman for a well-known watch company.

Those who caught a BBC Northern Ireland documentary on the golfer recently will know how effusive the company’s top brass were when golf’s newly-minted sensation swung through the Massachusetts hotel’s revolving doors with that piece of tin under his oxter for their long-arranged corporate day.

Nothing but net, baby.

Booking McIlroy now might well be above that man’s pay scale. That US Open victory pinned him to Madison Avenue creative room drawing boards. If Don Draper needs short-hand for redemption, success, family values, youth, curls, whatever — he’s got his man.

When he strode off the 18th on Father’s Day, he was of course met first — wonderfully — by his dad. But secondly, it was Andrew ‘Chubby’ Chandler.

To coin a phrase: you’d be tempted to label him the Rory McIlroy of agents if he wasn’t Rory McIlroy’s agent.

He looks like his name sounds. If you met a friend for coffee and he mentioned casually “oh, my friend Chubby Chandler will be joining us, hope you don’t mind” — and then this guy walked in? You wouldn’t be surprised. He’s large and he’s open and if I was McIlroy, I’d like him in my corner. Here’s what he said this week to Lawrence Donegan in the Guardian.

“Sometimes you just put a number out there and you have no idea why. With Rory, there are no rules any more. I have no idea what he is worth because there is no set value on what he does. You follow some guidelines based on other guys but he has gone, bonk, sky high.”

Bonk indeed.

Chubby — who talks, in contrast to the clubhouse types who run the tours, like someone who’d be down The Feathers with Jim Royle, continues: “For instance, I called Rory the other day about a deal he had been offered. It is a very good deal, I told him, but I have no idea if it’s for the right amount of money because I spoke to someone else and they offered more.

So you are just feeling your way out there. The thing is if we do deals that are sympathetic to Rory then I know we won’t go far wrong. He is 22, the lad, and we have got to make sure he isn’t a basket case by the time he is 25.”

By the 25, Michael Jordan was more famous than the president and sold more shoes than Clarkes. And he won a few ball games too. This is going to be interesting.