Callaway ad was misguided messenging

This summer's controversial Callaway golf ad shows how large, reputable brands can be misguided in their messaging, three Humber advertising and marketing program coordinators explain.

The Callaway and Good Good Golf ad was posted Aug. 21 and was met with widespread online outrage. The scripted skit referenced the theme of being possessed by an obsession like the characters in the popular movie Obsession. In the ad, Callaway's new driver is the obsession. Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark plays a deranged golfer who is overly protective of the driver. The ad shows him roughly shoving professional golfer and content creator Alexis Miestowski to the ground because she was trying to use it. That scene was clipped from the ad and gained traction online.

The ad divided viewers into those who thought it was unnecessarily violent and glorified domestic abuse and those who defended it and thought critics were overreacting. It opened up a larger online discourse about the justification of domestic abuse, who was defending it and why.  

Program co-ordinator for the Bachelor of Creative Advertising, Richard Bingham said “there’s a lot of crossover here between content and entertainment and advertising right? Because at this stage no one is really prepared to be advertised to, but we are prepared to be entertained.”

He said the ad was “unbelievably tone deaf and kind of stupid” and now Callaway has to live with the consequences of buying into edginess.

Bingham said the “villain” is the renormalization of misogyny, and this ad highlights a larger societal problem.

Program co-ordinator for Post-Graduate Certificates in Marketing Management, Advertising Media Management and Entrepreneurship, Susan Kates said "clearly they didn't do their research properly. Clearly they didn't do their focus groups properly."

She said the ad pitch was probably overconfident in the public's knowledge of the movie, and Callaway didn't question it. 

However, Kates said the company did the right thing in terms of crisis management.

Callaway took down the ad hours after it was posted. Both Good Good and Callaway issued public statements of apology. Callaway's CEO admitted the ad should not have been approved. In a statement posted to X, Callaway CEO Chip Brewer wrote they are investigating and Callaway has "already made changes to our approval process aimed at ensuring this will never happen again." 

Callaway's Director of Content and Production Alex Upegui has left the company.

Callaway ended its partnership with Good Good Golf and said it would donate a million dollars to organizations preventing violence against women. 

Program co-ordinator for Advertising and Marketing Communications Diploma, Riddell Murica said he thinks the Callaway ad was genuine and not a miscalculation.

“I think that maybe in their minds when they created the ad, there was, or like the content, there was nothing wrong with it,” he said.

Murcia said a lack of diversity in decision-making rooms is why companies like Callaway are unable to flag potentially offensive content. 

“So that's a structural issue on how on the hiring process and on sort of how the company behaves in a sense,” he said. 

“The fact that they were like, okay yeah, ‘apology, apology. We’re going to kick people out, give a million dollars’, call it a day. Seems dismissive,” he said.

Murcia said Callaway firing people was an effort to assure their customer base they were safe to shop from again, nd to stop further questions about the structure of the company that allowed this type of ad to go ahead.

“I don’t get the sense that they’re taking it that seriously,” Murcia said about Callaway's response.

Kates said the best approach is for companies to move on quickly “because, believe it or not, the market or the audience has a very short memory.”