How Under Armour scored Spieth

On the same day, in January 2013, that Nike announced its huge deal with Rory McIlroy, Under Armour announced it had signed Jordan Spieth. Spieth didn't get an eighth of the press or the fanfare of Nike and McIlroy, who was doing satellite interviews from Abu Dhabi that day, but Spieth and Under Armour might get the last laugh.

Under Armour is no longer David to Nike's Goliath. The company did $2.3 billion in sales in 2013. And yet, the brand's name and logo tattooed all over Spieth at Augusta National on Sunday comes as somewhat of a surprise.

Under Armour doesn't make golf equipment. It doesn't even make golf shoes. But here it was, completely owning the real estate on the body of the man everyone was watching. Three logos on his hat, three on his shirt ... 12 in all.

Sure, Spieth has other deals, but aside from a Titleist logo on his glove and golf bag and a NetJets logo on the bag as well, no company gets anything visible.

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Masters Spots Will Tell IBM’s Story in a New Way

AS a sponsor of the Masters last year, IBM did what most sponsors did and introduced a few new commercials that ran in heavy rotation during the golf tournament. But this year, in the advertising equivalent of a driving range, IBM is teeing up about 50 commercials that will run just once.

To introduce a new campaign, “Made With IBM,” the company dispatched three filmmakers to 17 countries to document its technology in action. About half of the spots, which are 30 or 60 seconds long, feature businesses, public agencies and other IBM customers.

In one spot, for example, a representative from Sky Italia, the satellite television broadcaster, credits tools that collect and analyze social media mentions with helping to gauge subscribers’ favorite shows. In another, a representative from Lindt, the Swiss chocolate company, credits cloud-computing expertise with increasing online sales.

Other spots feature IBM researchers (IBMers, in company parlance) explaining emerging technological solutions, such as how Watson, the cognitive computing system that famously vanquished “Jeopardy!” champions in 2011, is used by oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to help choose diagnostic and treatment approaches, and by chefs to develop counterintuitive recipes.

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