Back in June we wrote about Wowcher’s marketing email referencing a crocodile attack on a toddler, and the wider lesson it carried: speed without judgment is how brands end up apologising in public. A few months on, a much bigger and more damaging version of the same failure has played out — and it points to a gap in most sign-off processes that the Wowcher case didn’t fully expose.
The short version: Callaway Golf and the YouTube golf group Good Good released a promotional video for a new co-branded driver in which Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark shoves fellow golfer Alexis Miestowski to the ground, warning her not to touch his new club. It was meant as knockabout humour. Instead it seemed, to a huge number of viewers, as a joke built on violence against a woman — and the backlash was immediate. Within days a number of retailers pulled Good Good merchandise from their shelves. Callaway’s CEO, Chip Brewer, posted a personal apology admitting the video had been approved internally before release: “That approval should never have happened.” Callaway then terminated the partnership outright and pledged a million dollars to organisations addressing violence against women.
That is a remarkable amount of damage for a single piece of promotional content, and it happened to a company with far more marketing infrastructure than Wowcher. So this wasn’t a case of nobody checking the ad – somebody at Callaway did check it, and signed it off anyway. The failure wasn’t a lack of process — it was a process that wasn’t built to catch this particular kind of risk.
Maybe this is a lesson about working with influencers — and the importance of understanding that creator’s tone and sense of what their existing audience will find funny. A sign-off process built for a company’s own copywriters may never think to ask whether a partner’s creative style even fits the customers the brand is trying to win.
The checklist we described in June still holds — heightened scrutiny for anything touching humour, harm, or vulnerable groups, and a simple test of whether the content could be seen as exploiting or trivialising suffering. What this case adds is that the same scrutiny has to apply to content a brand didn’t write itself. If your review only checks tone against your own house style, and never asks how a partner’s creative instincts will fit with your actual customer base, an external collaboration can walk straight through a sign-off process that would have stopped an internal one.
To their credit, once the video was public, Callaway’s response followed the same pattern that limits damage rather than extending it: it owned the mistake without hedging, acted fast, ended the relationship rather than quietly waiting it out.
But the more useful lesson sits earlier in the timeline, at the moment someone at Callaway looked at that video and said yes. As more brands hand their public voice to creators and influencers, sign-off can no longer stop at “is this on-brand for us.” It has to ask whether the content is on-brand for the audience the partnership is actually trying to reach — including the audience that isn’t in the room when the joke gets approved.