In August 2026, golf entertainment brand Good Good released an ad promoting its collaboration with Callaway. The concept was intentionally over the top: a golfer becomes so obsessed with getting his hands on a new driver that he shoves a woman to the ground to take it.

The ad didn’t stay up for long.

After immediate backlash, it was removed and Good Good issued an apology. Callaway CEO Chip Brewer later addressed the controversy as well, acknowledging something particularly important from a branding perspective: Callaway had reviewed and approved the content before it was published.

And that’s where this becomes more than a story about one bad ad.

It’s a story about the creative process.

Brands want attention. And increasingly, they’re competing for it in an environment where safe can feel invisible.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Great advertising can be provocative. It can be weird, unexpected, uncomfortable or even divisive. Some of the most memorable campaigns have succeeded precisely because they weren’t designed to appeal to everyone.

But there is a difference between taking a creative risk and losing sight of the strategy behind the creative.

The question can’t simply be:

Will people notice this?

It also must be:

What will people take away from it?

Those are two very different measures of success.

The Good Good ad certainly got attention. But instead of keeping the focus on the product, the conversation quickly became about the content itself.

When the controversy becomes more memorable than the message, attention stops being an asset.

It becomes a distraction.

The concept appears to have been intended as exaggerated, shock inducing humor. Within the room where it was created, the joke may have seemed obvious.

But audiences aren’t in that room.

They don’t see the brainstorm. They don’t hear the creative rationale. They don’t know which references inspired the concept or what everyone on set thought was funny.

They see the finished piece.

That’s why one of the most important parts of the creative process is being able to step outside of your own intent and ask how someone else might experience the work.

What are we actually showing?

What cultural context are they bringing with them?

And perhaps most importantly:

Could the audience reasonably interpret this differently than we intend?

Creative teams don’t need to predict every possible reaction. That’s impossible.

But they do need to recognize the obvious ones.

The audience question becomes even more important when you consider what’s happening within golf itself.

Women and girls have become an increasingly important part of the sport’s growth. More women are playing. More girls are entering the game. And golf brands are actively trying to expand the idea of who the sport is for.

That context matters.

An idea doesn’t exist separately from the market a brand is trying to reach.

This is where understanding your audience needs to go beyond demographics on a strategy slide. Knowing your audience means understanding how different people may experience the same message, particularly when your brand is trying to welcome more of them into the category.

A joke that makes perfect sense to the people making the work can feel very different to someone outside that group.

That’s exactly why brands need people in the process who are willing to challenge the room.

But the people inside the room are only part of the equation. The audience outside of it is the point. We explore this idea more in Don’t Forget Who’s in the Audience.

It’s easy to look at controversial advertising and ask who created it.

But creation is only one part of the process.

Concepts are presented. Scripts are reviewed. Storyboards are approved. Rough cuts are watched. Final edits are signed off.

There are opportunities throughout that process to ask whether the work is still serving the brand.

That’s what makes Callaway’s acknowledgment that it approved the ad particularly important.

Brand stewardship isn’t something that happens only when a logo is being resized or a color palette is being applied.

It’s happening every time a brand decides what it is willing to say, show, endorse or put its name beside.

And partnerships don’t remove that responsibility.

If anything, they make it more important.

Collaborations allow brands to borrow each other’s audiences, personalities and cultural relevance. But when two brands appear together, their reputations appear together too.

Approval isn’t just permission to publish.

It’s an endorsement.

Creative teams spend a lot of time learning how to defend ideas.

Sometimes the more valuable skill is knowing when to let one go.

That doesn’t mean eliminating risk from the creative process. Brands that are afraid of every potential reaction rarely make interesting work.

It means creating better filters for deciding which risks are worth taking.

Before an idea leaves the room, teams should be asking:

• Does this idea reinforce what we want people to believe about the brand?
• Is the creative risk connected to a meaningful strategic idea, or are we being provocative simply to get attention?
• How might someone outside our immediate audience interpret this?
• Does the joke still work when you remove the context behind it?
• Are we comfortable putting the brand’s name beside this?
• If this becomes the conversation about our brand tomorrow, are we prepared to own it?

Those questions aren’t there to make creative work safer.

They’re there to make it smarter.

There will always be campaigns that miss the mark.

The goal isn’t to build an approval process capable of eliminating every possible mistake. That’s neither realistic nor particularly good for creativity.

The goal is to create a culture where people feel responsible for asking the uncomfortable question before the audience has to.

Because sometimes the most valuable person in the creative process isn’t the person who comes up with the big idea.

It’s the person willing to ask whether it’s the right one.

And sometimes good brand stewardship comes down to three simple words:

Don’t run it.