Big Scary Golfer

Filed in archive Golf Equipment on May 7, 2007

Top Flite Golfers: Courtesy, Florida State Pikes

You have to love marketing. Marketers are always working on ways to get your attention and then convince you to buy.

Marketers - and their even slicker city cousins, advertisers - invented the word "hyperbole". It's all about creating an impression; advertisers call it "image" and they do whatever they can to make you buy into that image.

The internet is creating a whole new world for marketers and advertisers. They have discovered "viral marketing". At least they don't claim to have invented it but they're leveraging the hell out of it whenever possible.

Successful viral marketing involving the web entails launching an ad campaign with a large web component in such a way that it creates a lot of attention and talk via chat rooms, emails, etc.

Dove has a web and TV campaign that involves real-life older women without their clothes on. Very tasteful and a huge success because it's creating an impression that Dove is for real people. What other kind are there?

But there is one web campaign that is just stupid. Top Flite has produced a new golf ball, the D2, which the company says is longer, straighter, has more feel - the usual stuff.

The D2 has dimples within dimples which are supposed to supply more of the above.

Maybe the ball is a couple of feet longer than another make's; maybe not.

The point is this: Top Flite's ad agency has decided to create an image for the D2. It's for the MANLY golfer, the guy (women are excluded) who "goes for it", "hits the big shot" rather than laying up, bangs his putts into the back of the cup. A guy who loves tailgate parties, Budweiser, paints his face stupid colors and takes his shirt off at football games to display his Homer Simpson physique.

Yeah, guys just like you and me. Or is it perhaps that we want to be like that? Gee, maybe we're closet "hard-core" and we don't know it?

Well, the D2 says "let's make a man out of you". I think you get the point. It's ridiculous.

If there was ever a game or sport that was the antithesis of macho, it's golf. How successful were you the last time you decided to gamble and "go for it", as Top Flite wants you to with the D2? How far past the hole did your ball roll when you tried to "bang it in the back of the cup" as Top Flite wants you to with the D2?

This is gridiron golf. And it bears no reality to the game I play. I am no wuss. If I am, then so is Jack Nicklaus who single-handedly brought the term "managing your game" to life.

Top Flite is going for the "red-neck" that they think dwells in each of us. And it's absurd. Of course, they will argue it's all tongue-in-cheek and designed to create that wonderful viral "buzz" the web is famous for generating for certain products or video shorts.

Frankly, I've seen enough bad advertising, been on the receiving end of bad agency decisions during my days as a TV producer, to find Top Flite's campaign un-funny.

In fact, it's absurd. For evidence of this, here's the website.

Agree or disagree? Let me know.