Callaway Golf approved a video made by Good Good, the YouTube golf brand it sponsors, in which one of Good Good’s founders shoves a female teammate to the ground for touching his new driver. Last week, in conversation with B&T, I said the damage to Callaway would be more reputational than commercial. I observed a single creator video was unlikely to show up in the numbers.
As it happens, that call was wrong. Unlikely yes, but not impossible: the fallout shows no signs of slowing as retail partners pull the Good Good product from shelves. Correcting the scorecard and the reasons behind it seems only fair.
Callaway opted to publicly end its relationship with Good Good. It has apologised in a statement, committed a million dollars to organisations working to prevent violence against women and conceded that its content review process was not comprehensive enough. That statement has drawn around 4,700 likes.
Matt Kendrick, Good Good’s chief executive at the time, accused Callaway of commissioning the ad, approving it, asking Good Good to absorb the blame, then dropping them in a coordinated media round. His post drew more than 24,000 likes and thousands of replies.
Callaway opted to shift the blame. It was outperformed more than five to one by the partner it attempted to shift that blame to. This speaks to a serious misjudgement.
Good Good runs a media business with roughly two million subscribers on its main channel, boasting serious investor backing and an audience who have been told for years that they belong to something. In short: Callaway viewed this as a simple matter of content and contract, with the fix being to cut ties and move on. What they severely underestimated was the very reason they were attracted to Good Good in the first place: the community it has built.
Callaway’s statement refers exclusively to the video it reposted. Kendrick said Callaway asked for the ad and signed it off. Its chief executive, Chip Brewer, has separately accepted the approval should never have happened. Obviously, all accounts cannot be true at the same time. Unfortunately for Callaway, by focussing on the moment rather than what led to it – and getting a huge creator offside in the process – it’s found itself on the opposing end of a community unwilling to give them the benefit of the doubt. It goes without saying that this only serves to expedite the brand damage to Callaway.
I said last week that this was a failure of judgement and governance. While that remains true, I underestimated how hard Callaway would work to avoid admitting it and the lack of working in collaboration with the creator to fix it.
A single bad approval is an easy one to navigate in a crisis scenario; it can be fixed with a policy update. But the fact remains that someone briefed this concept and a room of people watched a man shove a woman to the ground thinking it would pass as comedy.
Blame shifting to a creator with a more engaged audience than your own is poor strategy. Naming what in the creative culture and approval chain allowed this is hard, but incurring Good Good’s wrath and the public embarrassment to follow is harder. Both companies have since moved on people in those chains, and Good Good’s chief executive Matt Kendrick and president Joe Flannery left just this week.
Their departure follows the sacking of Good Good vice-president of brand and marketing Jeffrey Lefkovits.
The fallout has also kept spreading to people who had no part in making the ad. Golf Galaxy pulled its sponsorship of Good Good’s Big Break series, while Golf Channel has since cancelled a fully filmed season, so 12 amateur golfers lose the exposure they competed for. Good Good is off the November tournament, and the Tour’s chief executive publicly described its initial response as defensive and late.
Women are the fastest growing segment in golf and make up close to a third of course players. Callaway has handed them a very clear memory of what the brand found funny. I’ve seen some female-led creators making fabulous parody reaction videos based on this very point. With a community galvanised against you – and a further platoon of creators mobilising against you – the commercial impact of this mishandling is already showing.
The lesson for anyone commissioning creator work is that a creator partnership is – in essence – leasing access to a community. You are not, however, buying the community directly. That means you cannot leave the creator high and dry by invoking a clause and expect their audience to side with you on a technicality. Influence is built on trust held between real people, which is why the strategic work belongs at concept stage, long before anything is filmed. The opportunity here was to own it inside 24 hours, name what in the process let it through, and work directly with the partner (in full view of their community) to fund the cause and change the approval chain in public, preventing something like this ever happening in the sport again. Callaway took the drop instead, and now it’s playing the back nine into a headwind.
Written by Sharyn Smith, founder and CEO, Social Soup
