Good Good critiques PGA Tour’s Creator Classic ‘miss’

Welcome back to another extended edition of the Hot Mic Newsletter, GOLF’s weekly send covering all things golf media from me, James Colgan. The topic of this week’s newsletter is an enlightening interview between Good Good Golf and the Colin and Samir Show. As always, if you’d like to be the first to receive exclusive insights like these directly from me, click the link here to subscribe to our free newsletter send. But first, we work the phone lines back to Comcast’s latest earnings call.

NOT SO FAST
I’ve avoided writing too much about the PGA Tour’s first-ever Creator Classic — a nine-hole, made-for-TV influencer outing at the Tour Championship — largely because I haven’t found a satisfying answer to the most important question: why?

What business case was the PGA Tour using to justify the broadcast? And why would influencers surrender their production rights — essentially the core reason for their brand’s success — to Peacock/NBC? Without understanding the answers to those questions, it felt wrong to be overtly critical of the product.

In a recent interview with the popular YouTube Channel the Colin and Samir Show, though, the Good Good team offered a pointed critique themselves.

‘IT MISSED WHAT MADE US SPECIAL’
Clark and the Good Good gang argued the Creator Classic missed the mark on delivering an authentic viewer experience.

“It missed what made us special,” Clark said.

“The struggle is that blend [of traditional golf broadcast style and YouTube broadcast style],” said Max Putnam, a Good Good creative producer. “We talk about how do you bring more personality to it, but it’s something that we want to keep working on. That’s something I noticed during the Creator Classic as well, I want to see a Cart Cam, I want to hear them talk.”

“You should be mic’d up,” Clark said. “Everybody should be mic’d up.”

The Creator Classic wound up delivering pretty strong numbers for the PGA Tour, including its largest day of subscriber growth ever, and some 2 million views. But it just wasn’t very interesting, largely failing to provide the kind of entertainment value that leads viewers to either the Tour’s broadcasts or Good Good’s videos.

Thankfully, there’s room to experiment and improve from here on out. One just hopes the powers that be don’t let ‘good enough’ be the enemy of great.

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ALTERNATE OPTIONS
As for how a future Good Good telecast could look?

“You’re also missing the engagement that you could have with a livestream,” Putnam, the producer, said. “There is a part there that could be really cool, is getting engagement in real-time with the audience. It’s something that could be big.”

“It’s a big work in progress, but one of the issues was we didn’t know when we were talking on camera, we didn’t know when the Cart Cam was on.”

A PEACOCK MEDIA RIGHTS DEAL?
Clark also dropped a tidbit I hadn’t heard reported elsewhere: that Peacock signed a rights agreement with Good Good to broadcast each of the group’s live events.

“They’re doing our events,” Clark said. “The live events we broadcast goes to Peacock, as well as YouTube.”

That’s the first bit of influencer distribution rights I’ve seen sold in the modern sports media world — and speaks to both sides’ efforts to broaden the scope of their audiences. It’s also reason for optimism that future Creator Classics will improve from an entertainment standpoint.

“I think, if we’re smart about it, we can bridge the gap between [YouTube] golf content and traditional golf,” Clark said.

That’s a lofty goal, and if we’re being honest, a desire that might not be shared by much of golf’s viewing audience. But as so much of the industry obsesses over evolution, I think it’s only reasonable that pro golf looks to steal something from YouTube. With Bryson DeChambeau, we’ve already seen some of how that might look.

To watch Good Good’s whole interview with the Colin and Samir Show, which I highly recommend, check out the link below.

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