August 21st.
Vertical video. A fairway, pale grass, over-exposed sky, golf bag propped in foreground. A woman walks to the bag. Her hand slowly opens wide to grab a club, giving us time to see a male golfer across the teeing area.
He turns towards her. Then runs at her.
She screams as he shoves her to the ground. We follow as she falls, then rolls onto her back, arms outstretched.
She may be smiling.
POV looking up, the man bears down on the woman, and says with hushed voice:
DO NOT TOUCH MY NEW DRIVER.
The victim is Alexis Miestowski. A very good golfer. A former varsity champion who joined the Epson Tour, the feeder for the Ladies PGA.
Women participating in golf is up 45% since 2020.
But, Alexis struggled with the financial realities of being a pro: two years on tour, $1,800 won, all in.
So, she became a golfluencer instead.
A founding member of the Good Good Girls.
The perpetrator is Garrett Clark, co-founder of Good Good, a YouTube Channel, that took the stuffy old game of golf and gave it the MrBeast treatment. More subscribers than the PGA Tour, a branded driver with Callawayâs name on it, apparel in Dickâs Sporting Goods and Golf Galaxy, and their own PGA Tour event, coming up in November, Austin Texas.
Lifeâs been very good for Good Good.
Until this ad.
Good Good Studios presents THE DRIVER.
Itâs a parody of the horror movie Obsession, Clark reveals later. Players possessed by the Good Good x Callaway Quantum MAX Driver, priced at $649.99.
Released on a Friday, the ad is gone by Saturday.
By now, we know how this goes.
You donât deserve to be a woman, little miss Alexis Miestowski. Get the fuck off the planet now you little fucking loser bitch. Consider yourself a man. You are not welcome with any women. Youâre so ugly inside and especially out. Pathetic little baby girl.
We donât.
Read out on camera by the man who tackled her, one of hundreds Alexis received. Garrett Clarkâs apology runs eight and a half minutes, and two of them are him asking people to leave Alexis alone and come for him instead.
âI can handle it,â he says.
At first, Callaway â top two market share, 23.9% of all grass balls sold at pro shops, and one of golfâs stiffer upper lips â is supportive.
We are disappointed by the contentâŠand are appreciative of Good Good for addressing this.
Callaway approved the ad. It. Turns. Out.
Theyâve started heating the knives.
In America, a woman is shot dead by her male partner every 13 hours. Up 27% over the past decade.
Knives go in.
Callaway pulls the driver listing from its site, and announces their three year long relationship with Good Good is terminated, effective immediately.
Then, it donates $1 million âto support organizations working to prevent violence against womenâ.
Womenâs golf is up 45%, after all.
Dickâs Sporting Goods and Golf Galaxy pull Good Good apparel from their shelves. The Golf Channel cancels its upcoming season of Big Break x Good Good. No choice, Good Good steps away as title sponsor for the fall PGA Tour event in Austin.
75% of Good Goodâs revenues, played into the lake.
That night the CEO of Good Good, Matt Kendrick must have gone out for a beer. Or several beers and 40mg of Adderall. At 3:38am, he takes to social media:
Interesting that @CallawayGolf asks us to make an ad then approves it then asks us to take the fall then drops us in a coordinated media blitz and covers it up by giving a million dollars away thinking everyone will be ok with it. 30 for 39 will be legendary.
Uh oh. Kendrick means 30 for 30, ESPNâs documentary series.
The typo is an instant meme.
Twelve days after the ad, theyâre all gone.
CEO Matt Kendrick, Marketing VP Jeffrey Lefkovits and President Joe Flannery. Flannery had only joined that week, having previously been atâŠCallaway.
Creator Sports Capital, which includes Peyton Manningâs Omaha Productions, invested $45 million in Good Good last year and will be re-thinking its portfolio strategy.
Callaway wonât be.
Its bets on the young came off the table on New Yearâs Day when it sold control of Topgolf at a valuation $900 million less than it paid.
With Good Good gone rogue, golf is starting to look better off as its stuffy old self.
Except advertising has told this joke before, and told it well.
Terry Tate, Office Linebacker.
The Reebok ad series from 2003, directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, who went on to make Dodgeball. Tate flattened workers who broke office rules. In 2008, Tate came back as a political linebacker and flattened Sarah Palin.
A body double, but thatâs the point.
Back then, Tubefilter called Terry Tate comedy gold. Today, the same site called Good Goodâs spot a disastrous and insensitive misstep.
Different shot list.
In the Reebok series, the camera never shows you the impact. It just cuts to Terry Tate grinning down the lens, with a punchline.
You just subscribed to Terryâs Journal of Pain, and the first issue is free baby!
In the Good Good spot, the camera follows Alexis all the way down, holds on her lying there, arms out.
Then lies down there with her.
Those frames become the clip that isnât funny. The clip that isnât funny is the one that circulates. The clip that isnât funny is the one that tanks $50 million in sales.
Tiny casting note: the Republican nominee for vice-president wasnât Terry Tateâs subordinate. Alexis is Garrett Clarkâs.
Look, a lot has changed since the Reebok ad series.
Mostly whoâs holding the camera.
Good Good is from the MrBeast school, where the only thing that matters is whether you keep watching.
Retention outranks resonance.
Good Good canât deliver a scripted joke any more than Rawson Marshall Thurber can shoot How Many Tacos Can We Eat In 9 Holes.
Which Good Good posted as its apology was going out.
And while all the men were talking and losing money, Alexis Miestowski, who is a very good golfer, hasnât said a word.
âŠ
September 9th.
Black soundstage. Sydney Sweeney tees off into the floodlights. We hear the whip of a drive that might be 220 yards good.
Close up. Sydney Sweeney, naked, holding a golf club, hair draped over smooth shoulders. Line to camera:
Sports.
Naked, sat up on the rim of a basketball hoop, spinning the ball on one finger.
Sports.
Naked, locker room, breasts edging out of black football shoulder pads.
Sports.
Naked, splayed out on a pool table.
Sports.
Sweeney says Sports 16 times in 58 seconds. Naked for nearly all of them, save a small pair of white shorts, a football, and an occasional item from the kit bag.
Calvin Klein? Playboy?
Novig.
Itâs a âprediction marketsâ platform, or in plain English, a gambling app. For sports.
âWho better to tell you that Novig is just sports, than Sydney Sweeney wearing just sports?â said Jacob Fortinsky, the CEO of Novig, describing Sweeney as the greatest actress of our time.
63 million views and climbing on Instagram agree.
I thought we were genuinely moving past this bullshit.
Ariarne Titmus, four-time Olympic swimming champion, disagrees and she isnât alone.
Surfer Felicity Palmateer:
How far can you put womenâs sports backwards in 42 seconds?
After running a personal best in Budapest, Amy Hunt goes live with the BBC and addresses the actress directly:
Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like. Muscles. Hard work, blood, sweat, tears.
Sweeney loses 200k followers overnight.
The outrage is all about the person in the ad. But it skips the person who made the ad.
Also Sydney Sweeney.
Thereâs no agency, or production company or director named in the press release credits, just Sydney Sweeney and Novig.
Sweeneyâs title: Equity partner and creative director. Sheâs an active shareholder in Novig.
Fortune reported Sweeney re-wrote the script, drove the camera angles, the coverage, the messaging, and the music. All for a piece of Novig, worth $500 million following a Series B funding in February, led by Pantera Capital.
Sweeney liked the investment for the same reason any brand strategist might: Its focus.
Or as Sweeney says it in the ad: âNo betting on wars, or deaths. And no politics.â
Just Sports.
Sports betting.
And thatâs the difference. This ad isnât for the athletes. Itâs for a young American man, alone with his phone, not much else on, betting is the one place he might have a chance. He thinks he knows sports.
Sweeney, in a small pair of shorts, beckons him to prove it.
To Sweeney, all these men are revenue.
The day before Novig spot airs, Polymarket, valued at $20 billion, went live with a campaign featuring LeBron James, Derek Jeter, Eli Manning, Spike Lee, Emily Ratajkowski and Alexandra Daddario.
In the week of release, âSydney Sweeney sports adâ drew twice the search volume of Polymarket, briefly dwarfing search queries for Donald Trump and Iran.
Novigâs App Store sports ranking went from #50 to #11. Weekly brand mentions went from 392 to 4,633 in four days.
And the 200k followers Sweeney lost? 100k of them came back a day later. Net, around 0.4% of her follower base lost.
If advertising is there to make money, Novig, Pantera Capital and Sweeneyâs $40 million net worth all just moved up.
A lot up.
Sweeney took her equity before the ad. The last price on the company was $500 million, from February. Twenty-one days after the ad, per the Wall Street Journal: $2 billion.
Money, fine.
So, what about muscles, hard work, blood sweat and tears?
Hard work. Sweeneyâs first five-year plan was delivered as a PowerPoint to her parents when she was 12. She grew up in the Idaho panhandle and, for nearly two years, made 38-hour round trips to Los Angeles for auditions.
Blood and sweat. Sweeney took up taekwondo at five. At ten, wakeboarding left her with 19 stitches by her eye. At 18 she entered her first kickboxing competition, against men a weight category above her, and won.
When they look at me, theyâre like âyeah rightâ, and Iâm like, âLetâs go to a ring, Iâll fight you.â
Tears. The auditions left the family bankrupt. Then her parents divorced.
I knew I could never fail, because my family did lose everything.
Muscles. I guess, the ad has that covered.
To the athletes, Sweeney hasnât said a word. The ad does her talking:
You canât trade this. I just look good here.
âŠ
September 12th.
(Sydney Sweeneyâs 29th birthday.)
Someoneâs Huawei Mate, from the stands. It pans the Ice Ribbon, the Olympic speed-skating oval in Beijing, a black carpet laid over the ice, ruled into white squares, lanes of mats and gym sleds, and barrier after barrier printed with the same word.
HYROX. HYROX. HYROX.
Twelve thousand competitors entered over the weekend and a loud crowd mostly filming it, or filming themselves at it. This is one of those videos.
Station four of eight. The burpee mat: 80 metres of burpee, jump, burpee, jump. Joanna Wietrzyk has been going hard for 26 minutes.
Sheâs 24 years old and fell into HYROX as an F45 trainer two years ago. Now sheâs the world record holder. Every time Jo wins she clears roughly $15,000. PUMA, Amazfit and Dr Hydrate sponsor her.
Winning isnât soft: burpees aside, HYROX also involves eight rounds 1km running, 1km cross-country skiing, a 50m sled push, a 50m sled pull, 1,000m rowing, a 200m kettlebell carry, plus 100m of sandbag walking lunges.
Oh, and 100 wall balls.
Everyone uses the same equipment, competitors are released to the stations in waves every ten minutes.
Which would all be fine, except mid burpee, Joanna shits herself.
Not a little poopy.
A poo-nami.
For the entire second half of the race, Joâs shorts are wet through the seat. Brown streaks down the back of her thighs. Her right calf is covered to the sock.
She finishes first.
On a gurney with a drip in her arm, Jo posts:
Go hard or go homeâŠa win is a win.
Dying.
But, the shit has hit the algorithm.
Not a little poopy, either.
White privilege is shitting in your pants, forcing competitors to abstain from continuing due to stench and shit-stained slippery tracks then posting a win is a win.
One of thousands of comments and DMs.
Joâs sponsor is getting it too. PUMA posts are flooded with POO-MA jokes, the puma logo cocking its leg and AI ads for POO-MA sports nappies. Tricky brand associations.
Jo takes down âa winâs a winâ and posts a long apology.
Thereâs some logic here.
When you exert hard, blood flows out of the gut, into the muscles that need it. Itâs happened before. Paula Radcliffe stopped and squatted by the side of the road in full view during the 2005 London Marathon, and went on to win.
But, this is different. And not just because Paula had the choice when she wanted to âgoâ.
HYROX is shared sleds, shared mats, all indoors. That kind of thing calls for race judges to stop the whole event and clean everything.
Thatâs right, your poo is a bio-hazard, people!
Instead, they routed the next waves of competitors around it. Contrary to the comments, nobody was forced to stop, HYROX just gave them their money back is all.
HYROXâs own co-founder put it plainly within the week: They made a mistake by not reacting during the race. Theyâve now created a new rule. Blood, vomit, urine or faeces, and youâre a DNF â Did Not Finish.
Even without a rule, any small gym owner knows what to do in this situation, and thatâs going to trouble L Catterton, the LVMH-backed private equity firm that led the buyout of HYROX at a valuation of around $700 million, four days before Beijing.
Fitness trends are cultish and fickle. Its predecessor, CrossFit, is down a third on entrants, the company has been for sale since March last year without finding a buyer. HYROX is whatâs replacing it. In Australia and the UK, search intent is near vertical.
Not yet in America, the final frontier.
Rolling Stone Magazine: THIS HYROX RACE BECAME A LITERAL SHITSHOW.
For now, Joâs win and time are revoked.
PUMAâs pulled the PUMA X Joanna Wietrzyk page off the site, though the contract isnât reported to be terminated. Yet.
Coach Chris Bayens considers Jo Wietrzyk to be âone of the most genetically gifted athletes he has ever metâ.
Joâs first HYROX event was in her hometown of Melbourne. A timing chip mishap meant she crossed the finish line in first place, but her time couldnât be recorded.
She returned the next day, competed again, and won. Again.
Take whatever you want away from Jo.
Sheâll come back the next day. With fresh undies on. And sheâll win. Again the next day. And the day after that.
Iâll leave the last word to Jo:
To everyone who has reached out with kindness and support, it means more to me than I can properly express right now. I will be taking some time to recover, reflect and look after myself and my family away from the noise.
Love Jo x
â„
Markets
UK growth has stalled at 18-year low, economists warn | The Times
UK job cuts hit longest streak since early 2000s | Bloomberg
Cracks appear in Americaâs economy | The Economist
Brands
Good Good Golf lost its partners but kept its audience | Front Office Sports
Sean Walsh may have quietly left Good Good Golf, fans notice | HEAVY
Sydney Sweeney-backed campaign drives Novig platform growth surge | CNBC
Stop being outraged by Sydney Sweeneyâs betting ad, columnist urges | The Guardian
Polymarket eyes expansion into media alongside prediction markets | Wired
Hyroxâs explosive growth is creating unsustainable pressure on athletes | The Globe and Mail
Hyrox athleteâs viral moment sparks debate on extreme fitness culture | The Guardian
Lululemonâs new CEO faces similar challenges to her Nike tenure | Fortune
How On convinced MbappĂ© to leave Nike with Thierry Henryâs help | SportsVerse
M&S CEO Stuart Machin on the retailerâs fashion turnaround strategy | Vogue
Your friendly neighborhood Hooters restaurant chain evolves | The New Yorker
No CMOs sit on top boards of any FTSE 100 company | Marketing Week
Coca-Colaâs top marketer reveals what he wants from agencies | Adweek
Ex-Unilever boss Paul Polman criticises activist investorsâ short-term focus | The Times
McDonaldâs aims to build a $1 billion advertising business | Adweek
Restaurants turn to AI food image generators for advertisements | The Wall Street Journal
Bristol becomes first British city to ban fast fashion advertisements | The Guardian
The creator economy is splitting into two distinct paths | Ad Age
Solitary media consumption rises to 44%, reshaping brand building strategies | Department of Creative Affairs
UK public service broadcasters face existential threat from US streaming giants | The Guardian
Startups
Spotify founderâs body scan startup Neko Health launches in America | TechCrunch
PerfectTed targets $100m revenue as five-year-old matcha brand eyes billion-dollar future | The Cap Table
How a 14-person team built a $70M ARR business with 500 affiliates | The Food Stack
Here We Flo put tampons in ice cream tubs and built a ÂŁ10m brand | The Times
UK stationery brand Papier positions handwriting as the antidote to AI | Forbes
Ex-Google chief scientist Jeff Dean seeks $50B valuation for AI startup | Tech Funding News
Three brothers built an AI content empire from legitimate news sites | Futurism
Tech
What would you do if your employer could conquer the world? | New York Magazine
Kara Swisher says AIâs real danger lies with its builders, not the technology | The Atlantic
Hackers used Anthropicâs Claude to break into OpenAI | The Wall Street Journal
OpenAI launches Dots, always-on AI agents that work 24/7 | OpenAI
Metaâs cute AI mascot Muse hides sinister corporate intentions | The Verge
Meta removes camera from new smart glasses following privacy concerns | Vogue
Americans overwhelmingly distrust AI, according to new analysis | The Wall Street Journal
Money
Paramount-Warner Bros. merger will destroy Hollywoodâs mid-budget film business | Variety
Sensoriâs creator-funded model challenges traditional venture capital playbook | Inc
Seed-strapping becomes foundersâ alternative to venture capital funding | Business Insider
Can venture capital help unlock wealth and equality for all? | Time
Design
Chipotle creates signature sound by turning vegetables into musical instruments | Brand Innovators
Damien Hirst designs limited-edition Dom Pérignon Rosé Champagne bottle | Cool Hunting
Nick Haymesâ photobook chronicles childhood against historical tragedy | Itâs Nice That
Happiness
Having a daughter changes how bosses lead | The Economist
My husband has no friends | The Cut
Anxiety about AI dates back hundreds of years | The Conversation
If someone came to mind while you were reading, send it to them. Thatâs my whole marketing plan.
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