Key Takeaways:
- The Good Good Golf and Callaway ad shows how quickly edgy humor can undermine a brand when audience interpretation conflicts with the intended message.
- The fallout, including Callaway ending its partnership and Good Good losing a PGA Tour sponsorship, demonstrates that weak content review processes can create significant reputational and financial consequences.
- Brands should test messaging as rigorously as products by seeking perspectives outside the creative team, checking alignment with brand values and considering the worst-case interpretation before publishing.
- Accountability and meaningful corrective action matter after a communications failure, but a strong pre-release gut-check is far more effective than managing preventable damage afterward.
There are two things that can end a golf brand’s week fast: a bad rules controversy, or an ad nobody bothered to gut-check before hitting publish. Golfers know all about a bad lie, but this one wasn’t the kind you play out of a bunker.
Good Good Golf, the YouTube-born media company that’s become one of the biggest names in golf content, released a co-branded driver ad with Callaway that was supposed to be fun and a little edgy. Instead, it opened with co-founder Garrett Clark shoulder-checking fellow Good Good personality Alexis Miestowski to the ground as she reached for the new club, then standing over her and telling her, “Do not touch my new driver.”
Good Good has said the spot was intended as a spoof of the horror film “Obsession.” What audiences actually saw was a woman shoved to the ground for touching a product and a punchline that never should have made it past a first read. The ad itself has since been pulled from Good Good and Callaway’s channels, so if you want to see what all the fuss was about, CNN’s coverage of the controversy is a good place to start.
When a Punchline Becomes a Problem
Golf, as a sport and as an industry, has spent years trying to shed an old-school, boys’-club reputation and build a broader, more inclusive fan base. Good Good itself, with eight men and four women on its roster, has been part of that shift. That context is exactly why this ad landed so badly. It didn’t read as edgy internet comedy; it read as violence against a woman played for laughs, in a sport still working to prove it welcomes women as more than a footnote.
Once the clip started circulating, the “it’s a parody” explanation didn’t hold up. Intent rarely does, once an audience has already decided what a piece of content means.
Based on Wall Street Journal reporting, Good Good co-founder Matt Kendrick didn’t try to hide from public opinion. He told the outlet the company would direct proceeds from the campaign to an organization supporting women, an early signal that Good Good understood an apology alone wasn’t going to be enough.
The Cost of Skipping the Gut-Check
The fallout moved fast. According to ESPN, Callaway ended its relationship with Good Good effective immediately, closing out a three-year partnership and committing $1 million to organizations working to prevent violence against women. The PGA Tour followed by confirming Good Good would step away as title sponsor of its own November tournament – a sponsorship the company had spent years earning.
Callaway CEO Chip Brewer was direct about where the breakdown happened, admitting the company’s internal review process wasn’t thorough enough before it reposted the ad. That’s the line that matters most for anyone in communications: this wasn’t a rogue post from an intern. It was approved, produced and released by people who had every opportunity to ask, “Is this actually funny, or does it just look bad?”
Kendrick echoed that same accountability when he spoke with the Wall Street Journal, telling the outlet, “the buck stops with me and we should have had better processes in place.” Coming from the CEO of the brand that created the ad, that’s about as clear as an accountability statement gets.
A Personal Note, From One Golfer to Another
As a woman who plays this game, the ad was offensive. Golf is a sport I enjoy, and one where women are still fighting for equal airtime, equal respect and equal seriousness as competitors – not comic relief for a driver launch. Watching a woman get shoved to the ground as a punchline didn’t feel like horror-movie parody. It felt like a reminder of exactly the dynamic women in this sport are trying to move past.
That reaction wasn’t a fringe take. It’s why the backlash escalated as fast as it did, and why “it was just a joke” was never going to be an acceptable answer.
Based on an ESPN report, PGA Tour commissioner Brian Rolapp made a similar point when addressing the controversy at the Tour Championship, saying the ad was “clearly not aligned with PGA Tour values” and that Good Good’s initial response had been “a bit defensive and late.” When the governing body of your own sport says your first response missed the moment, that’s not a messaging hiccup – that’s a signal the whole response plan needs rethinking.
The Communications Lesson: Test the Message, Not Just the Product
This is the part every brand should sit with. Product testing gets rigorous scrutiny – durability, performance, safety. Messaging often doesn’t get the same discipline, even though it’s just as capable of damaging a brand.
A real pre-release process should ask:
- Who could this offend, and have we asked them directly? A room full of people who already think something is funny won’t catch what an outside audience will.
- Does this align with what we say we stand for? Good Good has built its brand on making golf more inclusive. This ad contradicted that positioning in the first three seconds.
- What’s the worst-case interpretation of this message? If a viewer with no context could reasonably see it as glamorizing violence, that’s a scrap-it moment, not a “let’s see how it performs” moment.
Callaway’s response, accountability, a real financial commitment, and a public admission that its own approval process failed, was the right move once the damage was done. But the far better outcome is never needing that response in the first place. A communications strategy isn’t just about getting a message out fast, it’s about making sure the message actually says what you meant it to say, to everyone who’s going to see it.
Nina Scarpelli is an Integrated Communications Coordinator at Franco. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
