Callaway Approved the Good Good Ad. Then It Spoke Like a Bystander.

Quick note before we begin. This episode discusses domestic violence as an image or a video used in a golf ad. I'm not accusing anyone of committing real-world violence. That scene was clearly staged for the purpose of selling a product. I'm talking about 2 companies who chose to make, approve, and put out a video for public consumption. The communication Is the story. So let me see if I get this straight. Callaway spent 3 days telling us it was disappointed in an ad. Then the CEO admitted that Callaway approved the ad that was posted. All right. Hey there. Welcome back to the PR Breakdown podcast. I'm your host, Molly McPherson. Now let's begin with the record. The facts: Callaway and Good Good have been partners since January 2023, and this was not a casual influencer relationship. It was a content—more on that word—and product partnership that included co-branded golf equipment. Now, on Friday, August 21st—that's last week—Good Good posted an ad called The Driver. I know that you saw it. The driver with the word driver over the top. It went all over social media because it wanted to promote the co-branded version of the Callaway Quantum driver. The full ad was about 60 seconds long, but chances are you only saw the first 15 seconds. Let me just play a couple seconds of it. Hopefully that's enough because you've seen it. Ah! Do not touch my new driver. Now, the ad, if you did not know this, was created as a parody around a movie named Obsession. Have you heard of the movie? Chances not, because that's another part of the problem around this ad and the choice to go with this ad. It's a parody on the movie Obsession. You can just take it from there, even from the title. And with the ad being a parody over a movie that now that many people are familiar with, that gives us insight into why this big debacle happened. Now, you saw in the scene, the female is a good, good contributor. She is a female— it's a common character where a number of women are a part of these groups, these bro content creator groups, and they act like the foil. Alexis, who is a professional golfer, is one of the contributors. She plays along with a lot of it, though I question why. But she's not my daughter, so that's a conversation for a different set of parenting there. So I don't want to speak to her and her choices, but she is certainly far from the only young female who participates in this type of cottage industry of, of content. She has not made any verified statement about the whole issue. Neither has the company pushed her out to defend the campaign. And that restraint is worth noting because she could have been pressured to come out and say something which, and thank goodness she wasn't. That would have made something even more problematic for her. Now, her participation and whether or not she said anything, I don't believe would change the public's opinion on the ad itself because the issue, it's the performance they scripted For companies to sell product. The ad appeared on Calloway's channels, and late last Friday, both companies took it down. But no surprise in the internet, this ad moved. Because deleting stops the distribution, but it doesn't stop the share. It doesn't stop the conversation. And it also doesn't matter because it still did not answer who approved the ad in the first place. And it also does not count as a response. It's just the first stage of it. Okay, now the response timeline. Good Good apologized on Saturday at 3:18 PM Eastern time, almost one full day after the ad was posted. Now, from a communication perspective in the hierarchy of a company, if you think about these immediate responses that should be going out, it's not just one person sitting on social media deciding to Push out some type of response. It has to go up and down a chain sideways. People are going to redline things. People are going to give their 2 cents. And while this response is happening, certainly there are people in that room who do not want to get caught up in it because someone or some, some people chose to approve that video. But likely no one in the room wants to admit that. That, that isn't the issue on the table. The table is simply the response. But that's why writing these statements becomes so challenging, the wordsmithing behind it, because the wordsmithing is also doing double duty, triple duty. They're trying to say the right things to make the backlash go away. That's number one. That is what everybody's intent is. And I'm saying this as a crisis manager. That's all they want. Make it go away. And then, and then the secondary thing that's happening, the people that caused the crisis don't want any finger pointed at them in the wording. Okay, that's another piece. The triple part of it is people who have an axe to grind, people who are upset that this turned into a crisis in the first place, they also want that feeling To come out in the response. That's why some of these responses, some of the lines, whenever I read them, some are like, "Ooh, that's a good line. That's great." And others are, you know, there's someone behind it saying, "Put that in." That's why they're all convoluted and they don't work. And that's what we have in this crisis. Okay, so now for the blah blah. The company said the video depicted actions that were not aligned with its values. It apologized and said Good Good would continue to make. Golf more inclusive. That's a value statement. Value statements are great, but value statements, they need to include the Indestructible PR Framework. This is my trademark PR framework for how to write truly the response that will get you through a crisis, not around it, through the crisis. Simple. Own it, explain it, promise it. It's not hard. To do a few of it. Sometimes it's really easy to write the own it piece of it, but you might miss the promise, the change, or you'll write the own it part by just writing, I own it. And we'll see that in a moment. But just saying, I own it, without explaining what you're owning also is what makes a statement an ineffective statement. And in this case, you can't lean on your values if you are not explaining why your values don't match what you did, because you're not saying what you did. And then later on Saturday, Callaway released their statement. Okay, one line to highlight in this statement right here, quote, we are disappointed by the content that was posted, and we are appreciative of Good Good For addressing it. We are disappointed by the content that was posted. Notice where Callaway places itself in the sentence. They are the bystander to the car crash. They're not a part of the car crash. They're just witnessing it. Something was posted. Callaway saw it. Callaway was disappointed by it. Callaway thanked Good Good for dealing with it. That doesn't work. And nowhere in the statement does Calloway say, we approved it, it ran on our channels, we are reviewing how the approval process failed, why this happened. There's no accountability in this whatsoever. It's a deflection, and they are firmly putting themselves outside of the crisis. They were commenting as a company, uh, watching all of this crisis happen by sitting in the galley. Meanwhile, the PGA Tour released their own official statement. Quote, the PGA Tour believes in golf's ability to bring people together and create a welcoming environment for all. We do not condone violence in any form, and the since-deleted video does not reflect our values or commitment to inclusivity and respect, end quote. Then Matt Kendrick, the CEO of Good Goods, spoke with Nate Ives from The Wall Street Journal, which is an interesting choice. It makes me wonder If all these people were calling him and he just chose to pick the Wall Street Journal, or maybe he knew this reporter, or sometimes the Wall Street Journal, whenever it comes into crisis meetings in my work, I always mention to them, it is an outlet that's often paywalled. So it gives you that protection sometimes if a crisis is bubbling, that things might not pop up, pop out, or if the Wall Street Journal is doing like a hit piece or something like that. But in this case, this crisis was absolutely everywhere. So I'm not sure if that would be the case either. But this is what he said, quote, we fully own that we made a mistake. As the CEO of the company, the buck stops with me, and we should have had better processes in place. Obviously, the execution missed the mark and didn't come across the way that we wanted to. And in no way were we trying to make light of or support violence. But it came across that way, and that's our fault. But this part of the article right here, going into the Good Good YouTube channel— this is important because this, I believe, is the crux of the crisis: the YouTube channel. I'll be the first to admit this— I've never heard of Good Good before. I was on Substack, uh, earlier in the week with a live Talking about this crisis, we break it down and I ask the chat, how many of you have ever heard of Good Good? Now, it doesn't mean that Good Good is not a popular brand. There are plenty of people obviously who know it, but I don't have a community on Substack that's filled with a bunch of 22-year-old golf bros. They're people in like primarily Gen Xers, educated, elevated, snarky Gen Xers. That's who I say what our, what our community is. They're not familiar with the brand. So I wasn't familiar with the brand at all, and I just assumed they were merch. But when I found out that they had a YouTube channel, it's like, wait a minute, Good Good is a media company. They're not a merch company. They're a media company that makes merch. That's the difference. And that's why this happened. And this is also the reason why I think the apologies are falling short and why the apologies missed the mark. The video— I'm gonna argue with you, Matt. It didn't miss the mark. The video got out and was approved whether he saw it or not. And I will show you one more statement that leads me to believe he did not watch this video before it went out. But this was an ad created around a format. This falls into the Barstoolification of culture and sports and bro culture. I can't come off as an expert here. I had to talk to my 21-year-old son Connor. I, I always check in with him when it comes to culture, but always with culture and sports stories. He was headed back to college. He was just leaving Notre Dame, met all his buddies there, and then was moving on to college to go back to school. I had to ask him, Connor, I'm going to give you my take on this story, and I want you to tell me if I'm reading this right. And I said, from my research looking at this company, it's a— it started as a YouTube company. So they're trying to be golf's Barstool, right? He said, yeah, that's essentially what it is. And golf culture is its own culture community within that. So it's this, you know, pardon my language here, but just— it's just like this Golf bro, jerky bro type of culture. They act goofy, they do stupid things. They're not the only brand. There's a ton of brands out there. I mean, Barstool made millions and millions of dollars. It made Dave Portnoy a millionaire a million times over, right? Because this culture, this formula works, and all they're trying to do is parrot that. Dave Portnoy makes no apologies about how he treats women. And believe me, his history with women, like what he's done with women Women he's dated in real life, how he treats them, what he says about them, uh, that's on the record. And, and by the way, spoiler, it's poor, it's horrible. So that's why I'm not surprised at all that this video made its way out as an ad campaign. I'm really not, because it's who they are. The algorithm in YouTube favored the content because it goes to a segment, a community of Let's say it like young men who are embracing this idea of golf culture and this kind of edgy ideological golf culture. You know what I'm saying here? Are you following what I'm saying there? That's the brand. And it has kind of this no apologies feel to it. But the problem is, is this video parody got away from them. It got too big. If it wasn't attached to Calloway, maybe it would have just slipped under or created a little bumps here or there because it's their branding. If you look at any of their other videos, which I did, it's the same. It's the same crude, stupid humor. So the cancellation, if you will, is not that typical cancel culture woke backlash response. If you're thinking back to like Bud Light, for instance. And Dylan Mulvaney, like, how dare you? You know, like, that was all about— you did a promotion over March Madness with someone who's trans. How dare you? And then it became political and it became this huge, huge deal. Violence against women is a huge deal. But I'm threading a needle here. And I said this on the live and I had to ask everyone, are you— do you agree with me on this? Do you follow with me on this? Or am I way off base? And they got me on this. I saw a couple like, bingo, yes, 100%. I don't think the big grievance was just that they were making violence against women a joke, because don't get me wrong, that's a huge part of it. But it's that they're stupid enough to make violence against women a joke in a Calloway Collab. That's why I think this became such a big deal. They could have had their stupid, dumb parody clip. And if— and again, if you look at their stuff, you will see it. They treat her, Alexis, as the foil constantly. And if Alexis were my daughter, we would have conversations about this. But she's not the fault, okay? She has every right. There's all— like I said, there's always a female foil in a lot of these. She's not the problem. She's just playing the role. Unfortunately, she's— they have to make her the foil. She's the joke. She's the laughingstock, right? To set up their stupid gallows humor. But that's what I think it truly is. People are looking at it like, you guys are a bunch of dopes. Like, why, why would you be so dumb to do it? That's where I think so much of this backlash came from. If you read a lot of the commentary online, It has more of the flavor of, are you kidding me? Are you, are you that stupid? Like, we're making ads like this about this? Really? So let me go back to what Matt Kendrick says in the Wall Street Journal. I'm going to continue on the article. Quote, as we've gotten bigger and there's more eyeballs on what we do, we need to think about every piece of the business from our communications and understanding we have more influence now. We have more responsibility when we post, Kendrick said. That's a good statement. That's a good statement because I don't think that was hammered out by a bunch of people in a room and redlined. I think that's what he's actually saying as a CEO. He is essentially admitting, oh, we can't be dumb bro humor anymore. We have more eyeballs. This isn't just an algorithm channel. That's targeting directly towards that young bro audience. Everybody is seeing this. The whole industry is seeing this. Anyone affiliated with Callaway is seeing this, and it's going to trigger issues like it absolutely did. That is the most organic and smart thing that he said in all of these responses. He also says, we are a content creator company and we've made hundreds of hours of content over the last year, and we post a ton of content all the time. This is why I don't think this is scripted. This is just him talking on the phone, like a ton. You don't see a ton in a written statement, but you hear a CEO of a good, good golf company. Yeah, that sounds like exactly what he'd be saying. Quote, I think with content creators in general, they post differently than your normal advertising agency. It's just getting that mindset and training teams to understand that we've got to think a little bit Differently now. Then Callaway posts a new statement, and this is attributed to the CEO Chip Brewer. So this came on Tuesday morning, in part, quote, while the video was produced by Good Good, it was approved by Callaway prior to posting. He said that approval should never have happened. To be clear, we are unequivocally against discrimination, domestic violence, or threatening behavior Of any kind, the brand added that it's conducting internal and external investigations and making changes to its approval process. Now, why is looking closely at these statements so important? It's because of that one sentence: "It was approved by Callaway prior to posting." That's the sentence that changes the communication story, because now we know that Callaway's first statement was not written in the position. of a bystander. It was written by a participant who was trying to act like a bystander. So here's the name that I have for the move: bystander statement. A bystander statement is when a company or an organization comments on its own conduct by acting like a bystander instead of an active participant. In other words, they describe what happens, Without owning up to any accountability about why it happened in the first place. It never identified its own role. I mean, looking again at Calloway's wording, we are disappointed by the content that was posted. Content that was posted. Pointing the finger. By whom? Approved by whom? Distributed by whom? The grammar removes the actors. And when actors are removed from a statement, I start looking for them. And I want you to start looking for them. That's how you can distinguish a good, good statement from a bad, bad one. And this is why passive language matters. Not because every statement needs to sound like a courtroom confession. We don't need to know every who, what, why, where, when. Who's the guilty party? And we're pointing it at you. And now it's going to be a big witch hunt. Even though I know that's what it feels like being in the room when you have to write these things, that's not what's happening on the outside. It matters because the language tells the audience exactly where the company stands. It's the CEO's second statement that places Callaway back inside the approval process, and that matters. The first story was, well, why would anybody approve this ad? And the second story, Is why is Callaway talking like it merely discovered an ad that had already been approved? They were just casually involved. And the use of holding statements for companies is very common. You want to have a holding statement, but if it was written as an actual holding statement, you have to think of the word holding. This is the line we're holding right now while we do things, whether it's investigate, change, Figure out more. What was the approval process? How did this happen? If you're in the middle of explaining the process, that's what a holding statement can do for you. So what they could have said, we removed the ad. We are reviewing how it was conceived and approved, including our own role, and we will provide more information. Does that formula sound familiar? Anyone listening to this podcast knows that's the Indestructible PR Framework. Own it, explain it, promise it. We removed the ad. Own it. We are reviewing how it was conceived and approved, including our own role. Explain it. We will provide more information. Promise it. So easy. And that also gives you time because it tells the audience that's not our final answer. There's more here, but it gives you time. People aren't going to crazy react and give you a lot of backlash for a statement, a holding statement like that. They won't. I mean, you'll still— it will still be there, but it won't be as bad. Now, the consequences. Tuesday, this was no longer confined just to social media. The PGA Tour CEO Brian Roloff called Goodgood's initial response disappointing. Oh, you never want to be on the other side of that. He called it late and a bit defensive. So he's actually reading the tea leaves, which is good. He said the later responses were improving, but described the status of Goodgood's PGA Tour relationship as Ooh, fluid. Yikes. Fluid does not mean terminated. It's like a holding word. See how it works? Golf Channel postponed the premiere of Big Break with Good Good until September 1st after an unnamed sponsor requested its branding be removed. Sports Business Journal reported that the sponsor was Golf Galaxy, but Golf Galaxy did not confirm that. Also today, at the time of this recording, Wednesday, August 26th, Front Office Sports reported that Golf Galaxy, Dick's Sporting Goods, and some PGA Tour Superstore locations have removed Good Good products from online or physical sales. So I don't know all the details of everything that's happening with these consequences, with these relationships and the terminations, but I will tell you that the consequences, whether they're hypothetical or not, are big and they're costly. They're costly to a reputation, but also Money. The crisis moved from communications to contracts, and that's when people start paying attention. Now, I want to quickly go back to something that I touched on that Matt Kendrick said in his interview with The Wall Street Journal. Good Good is a media company. I had to dig to find that out. Now, I read a post on Matt Kendrick's LinkedIn. He posted about a year ago, quote, Good Good has secured a $45 million investment to fuel our next stage of growth. Led by Creator Sports Capital, with significant participation from Manhattan West, Sunflower Bank, and Peyton Manning's Omaha Productions. When I read that, I went, oh, of course. Now I get it. Now I get it. I mentioned earlier the barstoolification, uh, that's happening culturally. That's where good, good golf sits. But you take a Peyton Manning's Omaha Productions, which is wildly successful. That is sports. But think about the type of branding that Peyton and Eli Manning do in a lot of these ads. They're goofy. It's dad humor. It's not this coarse, crude humor. It's silly dad sports humor. Matt Kendrick, I believe, from this Wall Street Journal interview recognizes that. This is the bump in the road from being what they are and trying to be something else to get the big money. But they're losing who they are, which is what got them where they are and got them the algorithm and everything else. But if you are trying to be an Omaha Productions, Peyton and Eli, the persona is completely different. That's why you're going to have these bumps. And that's exactly why this crisis happened. It's that intersection of trying to be 2 things at once. You can't. You can't. And that's why I believe that Matt Kendrick is incredibly frustrated over what happened, because it doesn't address the weakness inside the room. Like, how did this ad get approved? It almost doesn't matter as much because the weakness in the business— Is the persona of the brand. They are Barstool trying to be Omaha Productions. Dave Portnoy and Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, you cannot get further apart on that spectrum. You cannot be Peyton Manning and Dave Portnoy at the same time. You have to decide. Kendrick said the company envisioned a, quote, 360-degree media company. Those are his words. The distinction matters. Good Good is not a traditional golf company making equipment. Good Good is a media company about golf. Media is the engine and culture triggers the algorithm to bring people, the same type of people to your content and the same type of people who are not gonna be offended by a parody about How women are treated. That's Matt Kendrick's problem. There's so many versions of sports. There's so many versions of media and culture happening now. You have the Pat McAfees going one way. You have, you know, ESPN sometimes going other ways. You have Barstool. You have all these kind of competing entities that are happening. The media business is so much about money and capturing eyeballs right now. But the attention formula is built around an audience. But the audience has to be like a, almost like a hyper, hyper micro audience that's going to love you. And if they love you and you're, and they become your base, they'll get you through anything. But if Good Good is trying to be this big, big brand and partner with a Callaway, which is a universal brand, it's not going to work. And that's exactly what happened. That's what I think is the honest through line of this story. It is a company and a CEO, the founder and CEO of Good Good, Matt Kendrick, trying to do 2 things at once and trying to use media and media statements and a social media statement to bring clarity to it. But because he can't come out and be honest about what's really going on, it shows in these statements. I want you to see one more statement that I think really gives us insight Into Matt Kendrick, we're starting to see more and more statements pop up on LinkedIn. Honestly, I've never—I don't think I've ever encouraged anyone to write a statement on LinkedIn. I don't think I've ever edited one or worked with a company that said, "Hey, let's go to LinkedIn." That's never a choice because usually it is a brand in a crisis or a company in a crisis. We're going to an own channel. We're going to a website, or we're posting wherever—not LinkedIn. LinkedIn. is the reputation channel. It's not about Good Good. It's about Matt Kendrick. That's why I believe he went to LinkedIn. I want you to— I want to read some of the lines from his post, and I think we can get a sense of what's going on in his head. And that's why it kind of validates my thinking on all of this. So he posted this in the days that it came out. So posted on August 25th, Tuesday. We made a mistake, and as CEO of Good Good, I own it. That's good. Own, explain, and promise it. But remember, you can't just say you own it. You actually have to own it. So let's see if he does. Over the last few days, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the ad we released and the response to it. So already right here, we know this is not going to be your traditional typical statement because it's coming from him. And that's why this is so revealing. We're getting a sense of how he feels. The concept was intended to parody a scene from the movie Obsession. The execution missed the mark. Wow. Uh, it's kind of a golf analogy kind of baked in there as well. Missing the mark is the lightest way of saying that we put out an ad showing violence towards women. Wow. Talking about missed the mark, that's irony, is sitting in a LinkedIn statement. I understand why people found it insensitive, and I want to be clear that neither I nor anyone at Good Good condones violence of any kind. That sentence right there. I understand why people found it insensitive. That tells me that Matt Kendrick did not think it was insensitive. He has no problem with the ad. That's why I think he saw it. That's why I think it got approved. And even if he didn't see it, it doesn't matter. He signs off on those things. He cosigns on that type of parody. And here we go. Regardless of what we intended. Regardless of what we intended. That is dismissing all of it. One of the filters that we can use to find out if a statement is a good statement or not, I say, read that statement, okay? Read those words. Look at those words. Now picture someone hurting you significantly or even physically. And someone says to you in their response to doing that, well, regardless for the re— regardless of the reason for why I did it, I want you to know that I understand. Right? They're saying, you and I do not agree on why this happened. It's almost saying, you deserved it. He stands by it. He stands by it. Then he goes on, we are responsible for what we put into the world and how it's received. We got this one wrong. Okay. A little, a little backstep on that. For the past 6 years, we've worked incredibly hard to build Good Good into something that has a positive impact On golf, our goal has always been to make the game more fun. Fun being the first word. Fun, bro culture approachable and welcoming to people who may not have felt like golf was for them. These are all true, but they're only true in his category. He's not talking about 23-year-old women; he's talking about 23-year-old guys. Women's golf is an important part of that. We have supported and grown good, good girls and created real opportunities for them. Really? What? What? We believe deeply in what they are building and in the opportunity we have to introduce more women and girls to this game. They— is they women? The commitment existed long before this mistake, and it will continue long after it. But pointing to the good things we've done doesn't erase a bad decision. What matters is now what we do next. We remove the ad and apologize. We are changing our creative review and approval process to make sure more perspectives are represented before something goes out. For the foreseeable future, I will personally review content coming from our marketing teams. We will make sure this never happens again. I'm proud of what our team has built over the last 6 years, but being proud of our history also means holding ourselves accountable when we don't live up to it. We got this wrong. We'll learn from it. We'll be better because of it, and we'll continue doing everything we can to make Good Good a positive force and goal for women and men. Matt Kendrick, CEO of Good Good. I think that statement says exactly what is going on. This is a guy who's not apologizing for that ad. This is a guy who knew that ad was going out, stands by that ad. But what this statement means, or what I believe it means, is Matt Kendrick is recognizing our old content isn't working in this, in where we want to go with the $45 million investment in Omaha Productions and everywhere we're going. This ain't cutting it anymore. So we got to— we've got to change it. That's why we're looking at processes. That's what's going on at Good Good. So here's where I land with Callaway and Good Good. The ad was a mistake. The approval was the story. But the statements are the crisis because the statements actually reveal the who knew what, when, and where the breakdown happened. Callaway knew what they were getting and they approved it. Bad, bad on Callaway. Good Good Made the ad, knew they were making the ad. They didn't need to go through a change. It was the formula. It's what Good Good is all about. So we can't focus on the approval process at Good Good because that's who they are and they've never hid who they are. But the collision happened is because they are trying to be something else in an environment that's not going to let them be both. And so the reason why Callaway is so annoyed Is because Good Good and their bad, bad problem with their persona made Callaway look really bad. And that's why the story became a huge story. All right. This wraps this episode of the PR Breakdown podcast. A little bit different, right? It's not looking at the language to say, Good Good, you did a bad, bad job. Now you got to do a good, good statement to make this whole thing good. Because what you did was bad. No, this was about looking at statements, interviews with the Wall Street Journal, LinkedIn posts, flip-flopping on statements, kind of revealing things like trying to act like a bystander when you were a full willing participant. There's a lot of fingers pointing here, but it shows when culture clashes with public sentiment and what happened and how it exposed. But really, all this is, is a business story. This is a company that got big because of an algorithm, and now they wanna be mainstream, and that old formula isn't working anymore. And this is a CEO that's gotta figure out how the heck he's gonna make that transition. In the meantime, they're gonna make messy, messy parodies like this. It will be interesting to see what they do moving forward because they built their entire brand equity around being this bro golfer culture. We'll see if they can make it into being the Peyton and Eli Manning of golf. I think it's gonna be tough. All right, everyone, thanks so much for listening to the PR Breakdown podcast. That's all I have for this week. Bye for now.