Nick McAnally remembers watching families on the Old Course in St Andrews every evening, couples hand in hand after their photograph on the Swilcan Bridge, waving to imaginary crowds, grandchildren trailing behind them. He grew up there. He has now been with Callaway for 16 years. And when the brand began planning its biggest ad of the year, those images were never far away.<\/p>\n
The spot, which aired on NBC on Father\u2019s Day during US Open coverage, is built around real people rather than tour professionals. The final scene features Austin Tudor, a member of Callaway\u2019s own marketing team, walking down the fairway with his young son Henry at sunset. Neither of them knew the cameras were still rolling. Henry leans into his father and says, quietly, \u201cThanks, Dad.\u201d The crew kept it in.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we saw the first edit that came through, we were just like, \u2018That\u2019s the end,\u2019\u201d says McAnally, vice-president of global marketing.<\/p>\n
The ad is part of Callaway\u2019s \u2018Nothing Beats This\u2019 brand campaign, which launched last year and is built on a single premise: golf produces moments no other sport can replicate and it does so through the specific conditions it creates for human connection. Four hours on a course with no phones and a teenager actually talking to their parent, a grandparent who still shows up on weekends to play, a three-year-old taking a swing at a plastic ball in the garden.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen your kids are teenagers, that \u2019s the one time you\u2019re going to get maybe four hours with them talking, not on their phones, \u201d McAnally says. \u201cGolf is an enabler, really, for the family relationship. \u201d<\/p>\n
It helps that the brand has always had a framework for this kind of decision. Founder Ely Callaway built the company around a philosophy he called DSPD: demonstrably superior and pleasingly different. McAnally is careful about that second word. \u201cDifferent isn\u2019t always necessarily a good thing, \u201d he says. \u201cWhen you can find that sweet spot that people are going to like, that\u2019s where I think we get pleasantly different. \u201d<\/p>\n
\n Want to go deeper? Ask The Drum<\/p>\n
Father\u2019s Day weekend during the US Open is the biggest week in the golf calendar by both sales volume and brand visibility. It is also the week when every brand in the sport is trying to say something. Callaway\u2019s answer this year was to foreground family over features.<\/p>\n
The ad features employees, families of former employees and retail partners alongside professionals. The decision against casting unknown actors was, McAnally says, about doing it \u201cin a truly authentic way.\u201d When the finished version was played in the company\u2019s studio without warning, Austin Tudor saw himself on screen for the first time in front of the entire team.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think half the room had tears in their eyes,\u201d McAnally says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s just that that makes you realize you \u2019ve done something right. \u201d<\/p>\n
This year, for the first time, Callaway produced a second golf ball ad, in which content creators, rather than tour players, take most of the screen time, running on YouTube pre-roll to reach audiences outside the hardcore game. The brand works with Dude Perfect, Good Good and singer Niall Horan, who McAnally notes has made him briefly cool in his daughter\u2019s estimation. It reaches 6 million to 7 million golfers every day across its own channels. Golf content on YouTube draws 10 to 20 times the weekly viewership of linear television and McAnally says the brand has responded accordingly. \u201cWe \u2019ve now become a distribution network as opposed to a brand, \u201d he says. \u201cWe have our own in-house media production team, our social team, our advertising. \u201d<\/p>\n
According to McAnally, only around 4% of Americans play golf. The ambassador strategy is designed with that figure in mind. Niall Horan, Justin Herbert, Dude Perfect \u2013 their audiences reach well beyond the fairway and, for Callaway, the calculation is that some portion of them will follow. \u201cThe reach that they deliver beyond that is quite incredible,\u201d McAnally says.<\/p>\n
But the Father\u2019s Day spot carries different stakes. Golf was in gradual decline before Covid hit, losing somewhere between 0.5% and 1% of participation a year. The pandemic reversed that. The question Callaway is asking in its creative is whether the people who picked up a club for the first time in 2020, or who watched their parent play their whole life and finally joined them, can be made to feel that this is a game for them too.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t have to be competing for a US Open to enjoy golf,\u201d McAnally says. \u201cAnd it has this great thing that even beginners are still going to hit those one or two shots that make them come back for more. \u201d<\/p>\n
The \u2018Nothing Beats This\u2019 campaign continues beyond this week. McAnally describes the balance Callaway is pursuing as winning people with the head and the heart and he is clear that the functional case for better equipment is never going away. The emotional one, he says, has simply become equally the point.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re playing better, you\u2019re going to enjoy it more. And there are a lot of other things out there that are looking for people\u2019s time.\u201d The ad, in that sense, is doing two jobs: telling existing golfers the brand understands why they love the game and giving everyone else a reason to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nick McAnally remembers watching families on the Old Course in St Andrews every evening, couples hand in hand…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25859,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3017],"tags":[1477,3053,10236,10235,44,692],"class_list":["post-25858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-callaway","tag-brand","tag-callaway","tag-creative","tag-creative-work","tag-golf","tag-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25858\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}