Every once in a while, a PR failure comes along where the public reaction is almost secondary to the question every communications professional immediately asks…
How Did This Get Approved?
That is exactly what I thought when I saw the latest campaign from Callaway and Good Good Golf.
The concept was supposed to promote a new Callaway driver.
Instead, the ad showed Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark chasing fellow creator Alexis Miestowski, pushing her to the ground, standing over her and saying:
“Do not touch my new driver.”
The scene was staged.
The creators were apparently attempting to parody a horror movie.
Everyone involved knew it wasn’t real.
And none of that really matters.
Because when millions of people encounter your marketing, they don’t sit in the creative meeting with you.
They don’t hear the pitch.
They don’t know the “inside” joke.
They don’t get the deck explaining the concept.
They see what you put in front of them.
And what people saw was a man violently pushing a woman to the ground in an advertisement designed to sell golf equipment.
Predictably, the backlash came quickly.
The video disappeared.
Good Good apologized.
Callaway apologized.
But then we learned something that made this story much more interesting from a PR perspective:
Callaway had approved the ad.
That changes this from “a creator posted something stupid” into something much more important.
This was an organizational failure.
Callaway CEO Chip Brewer acknowledged the approval should never have happened, and the company announced both internal and external investigations into how the campaign was approved and released.
Think about that for a second.
We’re talking about a golf commercial.
And the aftermath now involves apologies, investigations, executive statements, media coverage, questions about corporate judgment and potentially damaged relationships across the golf industry.
That is an extraordinary amount of reputational damage created by a piece of content that probably took less than a minute to watch.
And that’s why I think there are several lessons here that go well beyond Callaway.
YouTube: The Good Good Callaway Ad
"Edgy" is Not a Communication Strategy
Brands are desperate to break through and I understand why.
We’re living in an attention economy where safe content often disappears.
Marketing teams are told:
- Be provocative.
- Be authentic.
- Act like creators.
- Don’t sound corporate.
- Take risks.
- Go viral.
But somewhere along the way, some brands started confusing attention with effectiveness. Those aren’t the same thing.
You can get millions of views and still damage your brand.
You can generate enormous engagement and still alienate the exact customers you’re trying to reach.
You can become the biggest conversation on the internet and wish desperately 24-hours later that nobody had ever seen your content.
Virality is not inherently success.
Sometimes virality is simply a crisis moving very quickly. Great creative takes risks. Bad creative creates risk without creating value.
I struggle to understand what this particular scene communicated about the Callaway driver that couldn’t have been communicated without showing a woman being knocked to the ground.
If the shock overwhelms the product, you’ve probably lost the plot.
The Biggest Failure Happened Before Anyone Hit "Publish"
This is the part I find most fascinating.
This wasn’t someone accidentally tweeting from a corporate account. It wasn’t an executive caught on a hot mic. It wasn’t a rogue employee posting something without permission.
This was content.
- Content gets conceived.
- Then written.
- Then produced.
- Then filmed.
- Then edited.
- Then reviewed.
- Then approved.
- Then published.
At every one of those stages, someone could have raised their hand.
Someone could have said “Are we sure about this?”
That’s why the most important crisis communications work often happens long before there’s a crisis.
Organizations need people who are empowered to challenge ideas. They need communications professionals in the room early enough to influence decisions—not waiting at the end of the process to clean them up.
And leaders need to create cultures where saying “this is a bad idea” isn’t treated as being difficult, conservative or anti-creative.
Because sometimes the person killing the campaign is the same person protecting the brand.
Instagram: Morning Brew
Intent Does Not Erase Impact
This defense appears in PR crises constantly:
That’s not what we meant.
The creators may have intended horror parody.
The audience saw imagery of violence against a woman being used to sell a golf club.
Both things can technically be true, but only one determines the public reaction.
Brands don’t get to control interpretation simply because they controlled intention.
And once you release something into the world, the audience becomes part of the communications process. That means good communications teams don’t only ask “What are we trying to say?”
They also ask “What could people hear?”
Those are very different questions.
Know the Cultural Context Around Your Audience
This is another reason the campaign feels so disconnected. Golf has spent years trying to broaden its appeal. The sport wants younger players, it wants more women, it wants more diverse audiences, it wants to shed some of the stereotypes that have historically made golf feel inaccessible to large groups of people.
And it has been working.
The National Golf Foundation has reported significant growth among female golfers in recent years.
So if women represent an important growth audience for the sport, why create marketing that risks making that exact audience feel mocked, marginalized or unwelcome?
This isn’t just a values issue. It’s a business issue.
Good communications strategy should understand where your industry is going—not simply where it has been.
NY Times: PGA Tour CEO calls Good Good’s initial response to controversial ad ‘concerning’
Partnerships Don't Divide Responsibility. They Multiply It.
This is particularly relevant as brands increasingly collaborate with creators.
Creators bring something traditional brands desperately want:
- Authenticity
- Audience
- Speed
- Personality
- Cultural relevance
- And often a willingness to push boundaries that corporate marketing departments don’t have
That’s incredibly valuable. But there is a trap.
When brands partner with creators, they sometimes become reluctant to impose the same standards they would apply to traditional advertising.
They don’t want to ruin the creator’s voice. They don’t want to make the content feel corporate. They don’t want 17 lawyers turning a funny video into a press release.
I get it.
But giving creators freedom does not mean abandoning judgment.
If your logo is on it, your reputation is attached to it.
Callaway can’t say, “That’s Good Good’s content.” Good Good can’t say, “Callaway approved it.”
The public doesn’t care about the contractual division of responsibility. They see two brands, one piece of content, and they assign accountability to both.
Your Apology Needs to Address the System, Not Just the Incident
One thing Callaway appears to understand is that simply deleting the video isn’t enough.
CEO Chip Brewer acknowledged the approval failure and said the company is conducting both internal and external investigations and changing its review processes.
That’s important.
Because the most credible response to “How did this happen?” isn’t “We’re sorry it happened.” It’s “Here’s what we’re changing so it doesn’t happen again.”
Good crisis communications should demonstrate learning.
Apologies address the past, operational changes address the future.
You need both.
Instagram: Callaway Golf Apology
A 30-Second Piece of Content Can Create Months of Reputational Consequences
This is perhaps the biggest lesson for every CEO and CMO.
The cost of creating content has collapsed. The cost of distributing content has collapsed. The time required to publish content has collapsed.
The reputational consequences have not.
In fact, they’ve increased.
A video can be conceived Monday, filmed Tuesday and published Wednesday. By Thursday, the CEO may be explaining it to reporters.
And deleting it doesn’t delete it.
- Screenshots exist.
- Screen recordings exist.
- News stories exist.
- Social posts exist.
- Search results exist.
Your worst piece of content can outlive your best campaign.
That’s why speed needs guardrails.
The Takeaway Leaders Should Really Think About
The best communications teams aren’t simply the people who write the apology after something goes wrong.
They’re the people who prevent the apology from ever becoming necessary.
PR should not be the corporate fire department sitting downstairs waiting for smoke.
PR should be sitting at the table when someone is playing with matches.
This situation didn’t require some incredibly sophisticated reputational analysis.
It required someone, somewhere in the approval chain, to look at the finished video and ask “Do we really want our logo next to this?”
Apparently that question either wasn’t asked—or wasn’t taken seriously enough.
Now Callaway is investigating, Good Good is apologizing, Golf media is covering the controversy, the PGA Tour has publicly expressed concern, and instead of talking about Callaway’s new driver, we’re talking about the decisions and judgment of the people marketing it.
That’s the definition of a PR failure.
The product became irrelevant.
The controversy became the brand story.
So here’s my test for brands before they publish something provocative:
- Could this hurt someone?
- Could this reasonably be interpreted differently than we intend?
- Could it alienate an audience we’re trying to grow?
- Would our CEO be comfortable defending it on television?
- Would we still think it’s clever if our company name were in the headline tomorrow?
And my favorite:
- Would we publish it if we knew it was going to go viral?
Because that’s the irony of modern marketing, everyone wants to go viral.
Until they do.
Until next time,
Aaron Blank
President and CEO
Fearey