The Callaway/Good Good Ad Didn’t Fail Because It Took A Risk. It Failed Because It Had No Idea.

The Callaway/Good Good golf-driver ad has drawn deserved outrage. In the ad, a woman reaches toward a man’s new driver. He shoves her to the ground and warns her not to touch it. The point, apparently, was a spoof of the horror movie Obsession—a reference that Good Good offered only after viewers objected and the ad had been pulled.

But I think much of the discussion surrounding the ad is missing the larger creative point.

The failure was not that a woman was tackled in an ad.

The failure was that the Callaway/Good Good ad gave its audience no reason to experience the moment as anything other than a man violently overreacting to a woman touching his golf club.

That is a very different thing.

Violence, humiliation and physical comedy have been used in advertising forever. And, yes, women have been tackled in commercials before. In fact, two of the better-known examples of physical comedy in advertising—Snickers’ Betty White Super Bowl spot and Reebok’s Terry Tate: Office Linebacker campaign—include scenes in which women get hit or tackled by men.

Yet no reasonable person walked away from those ads thinking they were being asked to enjoy violence against women.

Why?

Because both ads had an idea.

A Tackle Is Not An Idea

A physical act is not funny, offensive, insightful or even particularly meaningful on its own. It gets its meaning from the idea that surrounds it.

In the Callaway/Good Good spot, the physical act is the idea. A man knocks down a woman because she touched his golf driver. That is not a comic premise. It is a sentence describing something that happened.

An idea would have told us what we were meant to react to or laugh at. It would have made clear that the man’s possessiveness was absurd, not threatening. It would have established an unmistakably heightened world, given us a reversal, or provided a payoff that changed the way we experienced the initial moment.

The spot does none of that.

Instead, it opens the door to one very clear interpretation: a man is using violence against a woman to protect a piece of sporting equipment. The driver is treated with more respect than the human being who nearly touched it.

Without a clear comic contract with the audience—an invitation that says, “We are entering an absurd world, and this is what the joke is”—the audience is left to interpret the act at face value.

And at face value, it is ugly.

Why Snickers Worked

Consider Snickers’ classic 2010 Super Bowl ad with Betty White.

Betty White gets tackled during a muddy football game. On paper, that sounds like a risky use of physical comedy. Not only a woman getting tackled, but an old lady! Egad! But the spot is not asking us to laugh at an elderly woman getting crushed.

The ad establishes its premise clearly: Betty White is standing in for a hungry young man who is not himself. She is playing “Mike,” a frustrated, underperforming football player. The casting is the joke. Her bad attitude is the joke. Her comic timing is the joke. Then, after he eats a Snickers, he transforms back into Mike.

The tackle is merely punctuation.

More importantly, the physical moment supports the brand idea. “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” is not pasted onto the end of the commercial. It is demonstrated through the commercial’s entire structure. Snickers did not just put a famous person in a football game and hope the collision would make people laugh. It built a simple, clear and complete comic machine around her.

Why Terry Tate Worked

The same is true of Reebok’s Terry Tate: Office Linebacker campaign.

Damn, that's a funny ad. What happened to advertising? Ah, that's a different post...

Terry Tate was an NFL-style linebacker hired to increase productivity in a mundane office. He tackles employees for taking too long at the water cooler, playing Solitaire, arriving late or failing to follow various corporate rules. The campaign became a pop-culture hit because its premise was so immediately, gloriously stupid: What if a company hired a terrifying football linebacker to enforce office etiquette?

The tackles are not the idea. The wildly disproportionate response is the idea.

Terry Tate is a cartoonishly intense corporate enforcer in a world that has decided this is a perfectly reasonable HR solution. The targets are not singled out for who they are. They are collateral damage in a deliberately absurd workplace universe.

Reebok built a comic world.

Callaway and Good Good posted an act of rage.

That is the difference.

And Good Good’s explanation that the ad was a parody of Obsession may explain what somebody was thinking when they made it. But it does not rescue the work.

Creative Risk In Advertising Requires A Reason

None of this means advertising should become risk-averse. The best advertising can be provocative. It can be weird, dark, disruptive, divisive and occasionally uncomfortable. Taking a risk is often the price of making work that people actually notice.

But gratuitous risk-taking is not an idea.

And “it will go viral” is not a strategy.

Before putting a potentially offensive act into an ad, a brand should ask a few hard questions:

• Is the premise clear before the provocative moment happens?

• Who—or what—is actually the butt of the joke?

• Is the act essential to the idea, or just an attempt to force attention?

• Does the audience get a payoff, reversal or release?

• Can a reasonable viewer understand the intended tone without needing an explanation afterward?

• Has the work been seen by enough people with enough different perspectives to identify a problem before the public does?

Creative risk should be attached to a worthwhile idea. That does not make it safe. It makes it intentional.

The Callaway/Good Good ad was all risk, no idea.