Nobody Approved That Callaway Ad By Accident

By now you've probably seen it: the Good Good Golf x Callaway ad that opens with a man sprinting across a golf course to shove a woman to the ground because she touched his new driver. Not a metaphor. Not a "bit." A grown man slamming a woman into the turf, standing over her, telling her not to touch his stuff, while a golf company's logo sits in the corner.

I've worked in media for years now, and I know exactly how many hands an ad like that has to pass through before it goes live: writers, editors, brand managers, legal, whoever signs off on the final cut. Someone watched that footage and said yes — not once, but at multiple checkpoints where a no would've been easy (and, dare I say, obvious).

Callaway's CEO has since admitted the video was approved before it posted, calling it a mistake. But a shove that violent doesn't slip past that many eyes by accident. It gets through because somewhere along the way, someone decided it read as edgy, and never stopped to ask who's actually buying the clubs, the memberships, the merch. Spoiler alert: it's women.

According to the CDC, nearly one in four women in the U.S. will experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime. That's not rare; it's common enough that most rooms approving that ad probably had someone in them who'd lived it, and just didn't say so. Unless the room was entirely men, which, honestly, is also very possible.

Nobody in those rooms mistook it for fine. My bet is they assumed a woman hitting the ground would read as funny before it read as real — and that's pretty damn scary.