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Every Friday, giovanni gallucci and Clark Edwards pull up a brand disaster on social and pick through the wreckage. The dumb decision, the post that poured gas on the fire, the response that made it worse, and the one move that would've saved them. Equal parts rubbernecking and crisis playbook, so you laugh, then you steal the lesson before it happens to you. Not affiliated with any brand mentioned.
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| ai-assisted content
[INTRO]
[HOST] Welcome to Social Media Train Wrecks, the Tuesday show where we roll up on the week's biggest brand disaster and pick through the wreckage. I'm giovanni gallucci, and this week Rachel Donovan's riding shotgun. We find the dumb decision, the post that poured gas on the fire, and the one move that would've saved them. Rachel, what are we rubbernecking at?
[GUEST] Gio, this one happened on a golf course, of all places. A creator brand with almost two million subscribers put out a driver ad where a guy sprints across the tee box and shoves a woman flat to the ground. Fifteen seconds. That's the whole spot.
[HOST:appalled] Now that's a Tuesday. A golf ad that reads like a police report. Pull us up to the crash site, because I've got a feeling the shove isn't even the worst decision in this story.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 1]
[GUEST] So here's the wreck. The brand's called Good Good. Golf collective, started on YouTube back in 2020, blew up into one of the biggest names in the sport online.
[HOST] How big are we talking? Because scale changes where this goes.
[GUEST:excited] Sixteen creators. Main channel's north of one point seven million subscribers. Real money behind them, real partnerships. This is a legit operation.
[HOST] Okay. So not two kids with a phone. A real brand, a real audience. Where's the crash?
[GUEST] They've got a partnership with Callaway. Co-branded clubs, the whole deal. So they make a spot to launch a new driver. Title of the video is just, The Driver.
[HOST] So far that's a Tuesday afternoon at any brand in America. Launch a club, cut an ad. What's actually on the screen?
[GUEST] One of the founders, Garrett Clark, charges across the tee box and shoves a fellow creator, a woman, to the ground. She'd reached for his new driver. Then he stands over her and says, do not touch my new driver.
[HOST:annoyed] Let me make sure I've got the picture. She touched his golf club, so he puts her on the ground. That's the gag. That's the ad they built to sell a driver.
[GUEST] That's the ad. And the golf world lit up. People calling it a mimic of domestic violence, in a sport that spent the last ten years begging women to feel welcome.
[HOST] And that right there is what turns a bad ad into a five-alarm fire, Rachel. It's not just that the joke's ugly. It's who it's aimed at, in a sport that's fighting for exactly that person.
[GUEST] Say more, because plenty of ads are dumb and nobody makes a video about it.
[HOST] Golf has a math problem, and the whole industry knows it. The growth is women. It's new players. It's the crowd that used to figure the game wasn't for them.
[GUEST] So everybody in the space is chasing that person.
[HOST] Everybody. Every brand in golf has a bring-her-in strategy right now. And Good Good's whole personality is, golf is fun, golf is for everybody, come hang out with us.
[GUEST:mischievous] So they're the welcome mat.
[HOST] They are the welcome mat. They built a following on being the friendly, come-as-you-are version of the game. Then they put out a spot where the punchline is a woman getting knocked down for touching a club. You spend five years selling belonging, and you torch it in fifteen seconds selling a driver.
[GUEST:appalled] And she's not some hired actress passing through. She's one of theirs.
[HOST] She's a creator in their own world. Alexis Miestowski. So it's not even a faceless stunt. It's the brand doing this to a member of its own community, on camera, for a laugh.
[GUEST] Okay. So walk me to the bonehead move. Making a bad ad, that's a mistake. What's the decision underneath it?
[HOST] The bonehead move is that nobody in the building read it cold. Somebody pitched, wouldn't it be funny if he's so protective of the new club that he flattens her. In the room, with the crew, everybody in on it, that plays. It got a laugh at the shoot.
[GUEST] And outside the room?
[HOST] Outside the room a stranger scrolls past a man shoving a woman to the ground. No context, no wink, no we're-all-buddies-here. There's just the image.
[GUEST:thoughtful] So the room was in on the joke. The internet wasn't.
[HOST] The internet never is. That's the whole job. Every piece of content has two readings. The one you meant, and the one a stranger gives it cold. Their entire failure is they only ever watched the first one.
[GUEST] And they, of all brands, can't afford that.
[HOST] They live and die on how strangers feel about them. That's the business. A creator brand is nothing but strangers deciding they like you. You don't get to make content only your friends can decode.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 2]
[GUEST] So it goes up, it catches fire. What did they actually do about it?
[HOST] First thing they did was right. They pulled it. Both Good Good and Callaway deleted the video late Friday, and Callaway even yanked the new driver's listing off their website. When the thing is genuinely indefensible, taking it down fast is the correct call. No notes on the delete.
[GUEST] So credit where it's due. Then what?
[HOST] Then Saturday they posted the apology. And this is where I start marking them down hard.
[GUEST] Read me the core of it.
[HOST] Quote. We posted a video to our channels that ultimately depicted actions that are not aligned with our values as a brand. We have since taken that content down, and sincerely apologize.
[GUEST:sarcastic] Ultimately depicted. That's a lot of syllables for, we shoved a woman down on purpose.
[HOST] That's the tell. Listen to the grammar. A video that ultimately depicted actions. Like the video wandered off and did something on its own.
[GUEST] Nobody's actually in that sentence.
[HOST] Nobody's in it. There's no we decided, we shot it, we approved it, we hit post. It reads like the footage committed the crime and they just happened to be standing nearby.
[GUEST] So the apology's got no fingerprints on it.
[HOST] None. And that's why the fans tore it apart. People aren't mad they made a mistake. People are mad the apology dodges the one thing that matters.
[GUEST] Which is.
[HOST] Which is, you chose this. This wasn't a leak. It wasn't a hack. A group of people wrote it, filmed it, edited it, watched it back, and pushed it live. Own that, or don't bother posting anything.
[GUEST] How would you have graded a good one?
[HOST] A real apology names the decision. Something like, we wrote and approved a spot showing one of our own creators shoved to the ground, that was wrong, and here's who reviews our content before it goes out now.
[GUEST:curious] Specific. Accountable.
[HOST] And boring, even. Boring is exactly what sincere sounds like. The flowery apologies are the ones hiding something.
[GUEST] What about Callaway? They're the big brand bolted to this.
[HOST:mischievous] Callaway put out the corporate cool-down. Quote. We are disappointed by the content that was posted, and are appreciative of Good Good for addressing this. We look forward to working together to ensure a more inclusive space in golf.
[GUEST:sarcastic] Disappointed. Like a parent whose kid missed curfew.
[HOST] Right. And it's a smart distancing move on paper. We're disappointed, they handled it, moving on. But read it close, and Callaway's doing the same dodge.
[GUEST] How so? They didn't make it.
[HOST] The content that was posted. Posted by who, fellas. Your partner, promoting your driver, on a deal with your name on it. You don't get to call it the content that was posted when it's your club in the man's hand.
[GUEST:annoyed] So both of them reached for the passive voice.
[HOST] Both of them. And there's the lesson. In a crisis, the passive voice is a lie detector running in reverse. The second a brand starts saying things were done and content was posted, the audience hears, nobody here will say the word I.
[GUEST] And an apology with no I in it.
[HOST] Isn't an apology. It's a press release wearing a sorry costume. The crowd can smell the difference in about four seconds.
[STINGER]
[SECTION 3]
[GUEST] Okay. So if you're advising Good Good a week before any of this, what stops it? Where's the guardrail?
[HOST] The guardrail is one person and one question. Before a single piece of branded content goes out, somebody whose only job is protecting the brand watches it and asks, what does this look like to a stranger having the worst day of their life. Not to us. To them. That's the whole gate.
[GUEST] And that person can kill it.
[HOST] That person can kill it, and everybody agrees ahead of time that they can. Because in the room, the creator, the editor, the guy who's proud of the shot, they're all invested. You need one set of eyes that isn't in love with it.
[GUEST:surprised] It sounds almost too simple for a brand that size.
[HOST] The simple ones always are. That's the maddening part of nearly every wreck we cover. The save is one person in a chair with veto power. And Good Good didn't have that chair. Sixteen creators and a war chest, and what they didn't have was one adult in the room whose job was to protect the thing they spent five years building.
[GUEST:curious] So let's get to the part that travels. Somebody listening runs a completely different kind of brand. What do they take home?
[HOST] Here's the storm-proofing, and it's got nothing to do with golf. Build the veto before you need it. Every brand that makes content needs one named person who signs off on anything with an edge.
[GUEST] And they read it how?
[HOST] They read it as your angriest customer, not as your creative director. And you decide all this on a calm Tuesday, in writing, when nobody's mad. You do not invent it Friday night with the fire already going.
[GUEST:thoughtful] Why does it have to be before?
[HOST] Because the day of the crisis, everybody's defending their own work. Egos are up, the clock's running, and the instinct is to protect the post you love. A guardrail you build during the crash is just decoration.
[GUEST] And the second piece. The apology.
[HOST] Just as portable. When you blow it, put yourself in the sentence. We decided. We approved. We were wrong. The brands that recover are the ones that own the choice out loud.
[GUEST] And the ones that don't?
[HOST] The ones that say a thing was regrettably depicted get a second week of headlines, because the audience can smell a brand hiding behind its own grammar. Accountability is cheaper than a cover-up, every single time.
[GUEST] So the wreck wasn't really the shove.
[HOST] The shove was the spark. The wreck was a content machine with no brakes and an apology with no author. Fix those two things and you survive almost anything the internet throws at you.
[STINGER]
[OUTRO]
[HOST] And that's the show for this week. Before we roll out, a quick word on what I actually do for a living. If you run a food or beverage brand, you probably know this feeling. Great product, and a feed that just sits there. You post, and it lands with a thud, and you can't figure out why the good stuff isn't moving. Here's the honest answer. Usually it's not your product. It's your content. That's the piece I run. I've spent more than fifteen years making organic social content for food and beverage brands. The short-form video, the photography, the stuff that actually makes somebody stop scrolling and pay attention. If your shelf is great and your feed is flat, that's a content problem, and it's a fixable one. Let's fix yours. Find me at gallucci dot net, or DM at gallucciNET on Instagram or LinkedIn.
[GUEST] And that's Social Media Train Wrecks. Watch the road, watch your feed, and for the love of everything, watch who touches your driver.
[HOST:happy] We'll see you next Tuesday. I'm giovanni gallucci. Drive safe.