Last week, golf equipment giant Callaway and the YouTube channel Good Good released a 15-second ad for a new co-branded driver. In it, Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark shoulder-checks his colleague, Alexis Miestowski, to the ground when she reaches for the club, then stands over her and says, “Do not touch my new driver.” The ad was posted on a Friday. By Saturday, it was deleted. By Tuesday, both companies’ CEOs had issued apologies, Callaway’s CEO going so far as to admit that the ad had been internally approved before it ever went up, which is somehow both reassuring and deeply concerning. Reassuring because at least someone owned it. Concerning because it means more than one adult watched this footage and thought, “Sure, post it.” The backlash was swift and, frankly, correct. But the more interesting question isn’t whether this ad was bad. Everyone agrees it was bad. The question is how this ad got approved in the first place, by an entire pipeline of people, without a single one of them raising a hand.
Clark’s own explanation is where it gets genuinely revealing, and also a little unhinged. He said he was “channeling” a scene from a 2025 film called Obsession, explaining that he was meant to seem possessed by obsession over his driver, the same way the film’s character becomes possessed by an object. In other words: the violence wasn’t the point, the reference was. He wasn’t thinking about a man shoving a woman to the ground, he was thinking about a bit, a format, a viral moment he’d seen work somewhere else and wanted to replicate for a golf club advertisement. That’s the actual failure here, not just poor judgment, but judgement that got fully replaced by content logic: does this reference land, does this bit read, will this clip perform, with the actual content of the scene treated as basically a formality, something to figure out later, if at all.
This is where the ad stops being a golf story and becomes something much bigger. Tiffany Tate, CEO of The Family Place, a nonprofit that’s spent decades supporting domestic violence survivors, put it plainly: a woman is murdered in this country every few days, and that reality still doesn’t generate anywhere near the outrage a 15-second commercial produced in 48 hours. Sit with that for a second. A staged, stylized, “Obsession-themed” shove got a multimillion dollar company to apologize twice in one week. Meanwhile, the actual, ongoing, extremely unstaged version of this barely registers because it doesn’t come packaged as content. No punchline, no reference, just true, continuously, with no algorithm around to amplify it.
That’s honestly the throughline connecting a lot of what’s going viral lately, whether it’s a golf ad, a streaming trend, or a slang term everyone’s suddenly using unironically: we’ve built entire systems that reward things purely for being performable and sharable, completely separate from whether they’re actually true, real, or okay, Callaway didn’t greenlight this because anyone in the room thought domestic violence was funny. They greenlit it because somewhere between the pitch and the post button, “Will this get attention?” quietly elbowed out “Should this exist?” and nobody was positioned or willing to ask the second question before the first one already won.
Maybe the real failure here isn’t that Callaway approved a bad ad. It’s that an entire industry has gotten so fluent in content logic, it’s forgotten how to check that logic against anything real before hitting publish. And honestly? At this point, that should probably worry us more than the ad itself.
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, call 911 or the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1(800) 799-SAFE (7233) or visit thehotline.org