"Golf is Boring. Golfers Are Boring." Will Partnering With Influencers Make It Sing?
The battle for relevance is a world war that involves everyone. By partnering with some of the best content creators, the DP World Tour might be able to turn the tide and win.
In Red One, the big 2024 Christmas movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Chris Evans and Lucy Liu, low down on the credits lists is an actor called Hannah Aslesen.
Her part?
“Essential Oils Woman”.
Aslesen’s Internet Movie Database page lists 39 acting appearances since 2014, including parts in single episodes of the Marvel Disney+ series Loki, the superhero vehicle Gotham Knights and the 21st century reboot of Dynasty.
Luckily, a successful career in entertainment is no longer made on winning the odd audition and eating dirt for years. As Seth Godin, one of the godfathers of Internet marketing, wrote in his 2011 book Poke the Box,
“Pick me, pick me” acknowledges the power of the system and passes responsibility to someone else … “Pick me, pick me” moves the blame from you to them. If you don’t get picked, it’s their fault, not yours. If you do get picked, well, they said you were good, right? Not your fault anymore.
Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.”
In recent years, Hannah Aslesen has picked herself, and delivered big.
That’s why she’s now getting picked, and the DP World Tour is the latest one to do the picking.
Being seen is good. Being found is all fine.
What you really want is to be sought after.
And Hannah Aslesen is now being sought after.
Those who’ve been here a while know why. She’s brilliant in the way that all comedy geniuses are brilliant: tone, timing, delivery, rhythm. (Exhibit A: Her Vimeo reel.)
She’s also the star of a new five-minute reel that was filmed during the recent Hero Dubai Desert Classic and has been doing the rounds on the social media channels of the DP World Tour — formerly the European Tour — and when you tune in, it’s hard to overstate how much she is the star.
The film features current DP World Tour pros Tommy Fleetwood, Matt Wallace, Min Woo Lee, Paul Waring and Akshay Bhatia, the veteran three-time Major winner Padraig Harrington, and a cameo from current European Ryder Cup captain Luke Donald, as well as other golf influencers in F0reBr0thers, Mac Boucher and Kathryn Newton.
Things like this always seem risky for brands. After all, there are few things less funny than than someone who’s trying to be funny and falling short.
Clearly, though, the DP World Tour marketing and communications team, or whoever it was who made the decision to hire Aslesen for a job for which she’s perfect — Viral Consultant for a squad of dour tour golfers — decided that the riskier strategy was to stay the course, a course where, to quote the script, “Let’s face it — golf is boring, golfers are boring”.
Perhaps the most important insight from this campaign is how the team working away in the shadows of the DP World Tour HQ understands something that has become absolutely fundamental: no one follows the DP World Tour. Just like nobody follows the Premier League, or the NFL, the PGA Tour or LIV Golf.
No matter how successful those organizations become, people don’t follow them.
People follow people.
People pay attention to people.
Yes, the Tours might play the role of guardian for tournaments and traditions that give the game some of its global depth, but the personal brands of the players who play on the DP World Tour each week are now the main thing — maybe the only thing — that can make the DP World Tour attractive to the fans and viewers whose attention is critical, in turn, to making the Tour attractive to enough big sponsors to keep the show sustainably on the road.
A case study in golf sketch excellence
The sketch writing is excellent — almost every scene is perfectly pitched, from Paul Waring’s old Nokia (“I’ve got three bars”), to Matt Wallace’s straight face for an Internet age Rorschach Test (“I’ve seen the video”), to Padraig Harrington’s “your fake mumbo-jumbo”, which pokes fun at Harrington’s oh-so-serious reputation and the fact that his own “Paddy’s Golf Tips” training videos have made him an unlikely Internet golf influencer in his own right.
We can expect that Aslesen was centrally involved in that writing too, given that, alongside Andrew Stanley and Aaron Chewning, she’s a core member of the St André Golf sketch squad. (For those new to St André Golf, check out the “Meet Gil: Professional Ball Hog” sketch for a beautiful intro.)
The creative direction is also spot on throughout — as you suspect it had to be, the central joke about golfers being uncomfortable in the glow of the influencer’s ring-light (and therefore needing influencer training from Aslesen’s viral consultant in the first place) being funny precisely because it’s so obviously true.
But it’s Aslesen’s performance that is the glue that holds the whole together.
The finished product (posted at the bottom of this newsletter) only further underlines how central the role of “influencers” — or, more accurately, the swathe of brilliant creators who have embraced new media, an always-on work ethic and the prolific output both of those things can create — has become in the quest of all established, legacy organizations to stay relevant, or regain relevance, in the utterly transformed world in which we all now live, work and play.
Because the reality is that the battle for relevance is a world war that involves everyone — everyone from 21st Century Fox to Nike, from New Balance to Netflix, from entertainers and athletes to major professional sports organizations and yes, to you and me and every small or medium enterprise that wants to get, or keep, customers for whatever it is we’d like to sell.
By partnering with some of the best content creators, the DP World Tour can transform itself from insignificant or irrelevant, and win.
More than just metrics
On Instagram this five-minute video has got more than 1.3 million views in the 11 days since it was posted. Over on YouTube, the five-minute video has, at the time of writing, been watched only 57,000 times.
In the greater scheme of things, these figures are not exactly rocketships to the stars, but at a glance, the previous 15 reels posted by the DP World Tour to Instagram got an average of around 40,000 views, so it’s a home run for them in stats alone.
Of course, things like this are about much more than just stats and data points and metrics.
They’re about sentiment, that intangible, almost mythic element all marketers and all businesses really want to reach.
They’re about heart and gut and feel, and you can expect anyone who spends just a few minutes here will have a different, and better, perception of all who took part.
When that happens, it’s win-win-win for everyone. All you have to do is check the comments on YouTube and Instagram to see for yourself how well this landed (and, equally important, to see how other brands, such as Lululemon and FedEx, are chiming in to catch a little bit of the glow).
Keys to the kingdom
The upshot of all this is that it’s going to make top content creators — those who succeed in the fiendishly difficult task of striking the right tone, the right style, the right production quality and the right volume that makes content resonate well with millions of people, or even a hundred thousand of exactly the right people — more and more valuable as the months and years go by.
Hannah Aslesen and her crew at St André Golf, and Mac Boucher, and F0reBrothers, and Kathryn Newton, and the others who weren’t here, like Rick Shiels and Peter Finch and Grant Horvat, all of them picked themselves, and then, crucially, they had the talent, the smarts and the perseverance to back it up.
If audience attention is the kingdom, the content creators literally hold the keys.
Thanks for reading.
Till next time.
Shane