Tiger Woods Actually ... Loses?

After December 31, you will no longer be forced to deal with the cognitive dissonance of seeing the world's highest paid professional athlete pull up to tournaments at the wheel of a Buick.

General Motors announced today that it is severing ties with celebrity endorser Tiger Woods a year before their contract was set to end.

Spokespeople for GM and Woods say that the decision to part ways as of the end of '08 was mutual, with Tiger wanting to spend more time with family and GM looking for ways to cut costs wherever possible.

Tiger's contract - said to be worth at least $7 million a year -- is not the first casualty of GM's recent scramble to cut back on marketing expenses, and it certainly won't be the last.

As the Big Three beg Congress for a bailout package, G.M. already announced that it would not advertise on the 2009 Super Bowl.

American car companies are some of the biggest advertisers out there, and continued budget cuts will be a major blow to television channels, newspapers, and magazines, which count on their advertising dollars for survival.

But G.M.'s decision to end the Tiger Woods endorsement deal will probably turn out to be one of the company's wiser moves. Woods was brought in by G.M. nine years ago in an effort to attract a younger demographic and breathe life into the ailing Buick brand, which was (and still is) favored mainly by the over-60 crowd.

But sales of Buick vehicles in the U.S. fell 58 percent from 1999 to 2007, more than any other G.M. brand in the period. In the first 10 months of this year alone, Buick sales dropped 24 percent.

It's impossible to know how those numbers would have looked if Tiger had not been involved with Buick's marketing, but it's a matter of great debate whether celebrity endorsements are at all effective with an increasingly cynical, savvy viewing audience.

"Let's face it," writes one commenter today on the Marketwatch website. "No one ever believed Tiger Woods drove a Buick anyway."

G.M. should also know better than to think that attracting a younger audience in this day and age is as simple as hiring a younger spokesperson to appear in the same kind of traditional ad.

If G.M. is serious about trying to attract more young buyers to Buick showrooms, it should experiment with more unconventional tactics, like viral video, guerilla campaigns -- anything to shake up Buick's yawn-worthy image.

by Liz Gunnison

Photograph of Tiger Woods at the Buick Open in Grand Blanc, Michigan, in 2003 by John F. Martin/Associated Press