If It Made Your Skin Crawl, Why Did You Publish It?: US Golf Ad Controversy

28 August 2026

Ed Davis:

Unless you follow golf — and particularly the rapidly growing world of golf creators on YouTube and social media — the names Good Good Golf, Garrett Clark and Callaway Golf may mean very little to you.

So, some context.

Good Good Golf is a US-based golf media and lifestyle business that has built an audience of more than two million YouTube subscribers around a group of young golf personalities. It has become significant enough within the sport to collaborate with major equipment manufacturers and, until this week, lend its name to an upcoming PGA Tour event.

Callaway Golf, meanwhile, is one of the biggest and best-known golf equipment brands in the world.

The two had partnered on a new golf driver — essentially the club designed to hit the ball furthest from the tee — and Good Good created a short promotional video for it.

That’s where things went badly wrong.

In the video, Good Good co-founder and on-camera personality Garrett Clark sees fellow Good Good creator Alexis Miestowski reaching for his new driver. He runs toward her, pushes her to the ground and then stands over her warning her not to touch the club.

You can view it here: https://youtu.be/KAScVbqYimY

Most of the conversation has understandably focused on the depiction of violence against women, the initial responses from the companies involved and whether those responses went far enough.

I’m interested in something slightly different.

Because buried in Garrett Clark’s explanation of what happened is a pretty important lesson about leadership, marketing and organizational culture.

Clark, a co-founder of Good Good and arguably its most recognizable face, explained that the creative concept was inspired by the movie Obsession. The premise, as he described it, was that he was so obsessed with his new driver that anyone who touched it would effectively become possessed by the same obsession.

Actually, I think explaining that was useful.

It gives the creative idea some context. Golfers can be irrationally protective of their clubs. An exaggerated obsession with a new driver could absolutely be the basis of a funny ad.

The problem wasn’t necessarily the premise.

The problem was where they took it.

At some point, someone needed to be the critical thinker in the room and ask whether a man forcefully pushing a young woman to the ground was really the best expression of that idea.

It clearly wasn’t.

There are probably 100 other ways to communicate don’t touch my driver without going anywhere near that imagery.

That is a creative judgment failure. A pretty significant one, but one that can at least be understood.

Where Clark’s explanation becomes much more interesting is what he said next…

He said that after seeing the finished video posted, “my skin was crawling.” He described himself as cringing and called it the “worst ad known to man.”

And that’s the bit I can’t quite get past. Because this wasn’t a spontaneous comment on a livestream. It was an ad!

The idea was conceived. The scene was staged. Clark performed it. It was filmed. Presumably they did multiple takes. Someone selected the footage. Someone edited it. People watched the edit. Someone approved it. Someone uploaded it.

Callaway has acknowledged that it reviewed and approved the video before it went live.

Which means there were at least a dozen opportunities for someone to say: Hang on. Is this actually funny? Or, better yet: How is somebody who doesn’t know what we’re trying to do going to interpret this?

That second question matters enormously.

Creative teams spend a lot of time talking about intent. But audiences don’t experience intent. They experience execution.

Explaining the source material helps us understand how Good Good got there. It doesn’t make the execution any better.

And Clark’s admission creates another problem entirely.

If the finished ad really made his skin crawl almost immediately, why did it take publication for that realization to matter?

He is a co-founder. He is the principal character in the commercial. He is one of the people most publicly associated with the Good Good brand.

If he recognized immediately that something was badly wrong but didn’t feel able to stop it, that raises a governance question. If he could have stopped it but didn’t, that raises a judgment question. And if the realization only really crystallized once it became apparent how badly the public was reacting, then the retrospective explanation becomes a credibility question.

None of those is particularly comfortable.

Every Organization Needs Someone Willing to Ruin the Fun

There is a broader lesson here for marketers.

Creative organizations need people willing to be inconvenient. Someone needs to be able to say, I understand what we’re trying to do, but have we thought about how this looks outside this room?

That person isn’t there to kill creativity. They’re there to protect it.

The best creative work can survive scrutiny. In fact, pressure-testing an idea usually makes it better. And importantly, the answer isn’t necessarily another approval form.

Callaway had an approval process. The video got through it.

That should concern marketers more than if the ad had somehow been accidentally published without anyone seeing it.

A process that everyone follows but nobody uses to meaningfully challenge an idea isn’t much of a safeguard.

You don’t solve a judgment problem simply by adding more signatures. You need people empowered to question the premise. You need people who can challenge senior personalities. You need someone thinking about the audience that isn’t already in on the joke.

You need to create an environment where saying this doesn’t feel right isn’t interpreted as being difficult.

Then There Is “Our Culture and Values”

There is one other part of these situations that has always bothered me.

Almost inevitably, once something goes wrong, a company (or person) says: This isn’t consistent with our culture or this doesn’t reflect our values.

Maybe Bruh. But we should be much more careful with that language.

Culture isn’t just what you aspire to be. Culture is also what your organization permits.

It’s what people feel comfortable suggesting. It’s the behaviors that underpin values. It’s what other people laugh along with. It’s what gets approved. It’s what people are prepared to put their name on. And, ultimately, it’s what gets shipped.

That doesn’t mean one terrible advertisement defines everything about Garrett Clark, Good Good, its employees or its culture. It would be ridiculous to make that leap.

But you also can’t completely divorce an organization’s actions from its culture simply because those actions became embarrassing.

For at least one decision, this idea existed comfortably enough inside the organization to move from concept to performance to production to approval to publication.

That should tell you something.

Maybe not about the values written on the wall.

But certainly about the behaviors, judgment and permissions operating underneath them.

The better corporate response isn’t simply: this isn’t who we are. 

It’s: How did this become something we were comfortable doing?

That’s a much harder question. And, ultimately, a much more useful one.

Because the biggest lesson from the Good Good controversy isn’t that brands shouldn’t make offensive ads.

Everybody already knows that.

It’s that organizations need people, processes and cultures capable of recognizing a bad decision before the rest of the world has to point it out.

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Ed Davis is Founder at Agency X.