TaylorMade’s Space Age New Driver Gets An Ultra-Modern Marketing Drive
Revealed just last week, TaylorMade's new Qi35 driver is ... almost everywhere. Here's a quick peek inside an ultra-modern marketing drive.
One of the most interesting, and perhaps most overlooked, elements of modern-day advertising is the Meta Ad Library.
Meta is the company which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and a host of other digital platforms which — according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast last week — are used by approximately 3.2 billion people every day.
The company created its Ad Library in 2019, as a transparent response to multiple political advertising scandals where data gathering and digital ad agencies were able to leverage the information Facebook had on individuals everywhere to send micro-targeted ad messages via its platforms — and greatly influence democratic elections (and other not-so-democratic ones) around the world.
If an advertiser is running ads on Meta platforms, Ad Library has the information about it, including the creative, the copy, the platforms it’s running on and the date the campaign started running.
Checking the library for TaylorMade gives a small but revealing glimpse into how the company has been marketing its space-age premium driver, the Qi35, with a series of ads that combine typical nicely branded product shots…
… with influencer-style marketing through the likes of YouTube golf sensation Grant Horvat.
Stick around — we’ll have more about Horvat below.
Over on YouTube, the publicly available evidence is that TaylorMade have not been throwing massive money at the platform, in terms of direct ad spend at least.
Google’s own ad transparency library was set up in 2018 — that makes it older than the Meta version but on the evidence of a deep dive this week at least, it seems to be much less mature than its main digital ad rival.
According to the Google library, no TaylorMade ads are currently running on any of Google’s platforms, including YouTube, Google Maps and Google Search, with the only ad active in the last 30 days from Taylor Made Golf Company, INC (to give it its formal name) a text ad promoting Sun Day Red, the clothing brand joint venture between Tiger Woods and TaylorMade that was launched in the summer of 2024.
Two quick notes on this:
I don’t find it believable that TaylorMade, in the middle of a major new product launch, is not running any paid ads on any Google platform, so it may be that either Google’s transparency library is unreliable and/or out of date or, more likely, a third party advertiser is running ads there on TaylorMade’s behalf and those are not being listed in the library.
Paid ads investment notwithstanding, YouTube has been absolutely central to the TaylorMade go-to-market strategy this month.
Because it only takes a quick dive into the YouTube search engine to show that the Qi35 is…
… everywhere!
All those videos in that scroll above have been uploaded since the January 7 launch of the Qi35, and no matter how big the product, that almost never happens by coincidence.
For one example, here’s Rory McIlroy, who’s been part of the TaylorMade squad since 2017, appearing with newly-crowned 1m-subscriber man Horvat, complete with scannable QR code and affiliate-link-in-description.
Here’s Tiger Woods, who joined TaylorMade last year when his 27-year deal with Nike came to an end, also teeing it up with Horvat in “Tiger Woods Gives Me a Golf Lesson”, another Qi35-tagged-and-tracked film.
And here’s women’s world number 1, and TaylorMade ambassador, Nelly Korda appearing on trottiegolf, the YouTube channel of TaylorMade fitter Chris Trott.
Two things are happening here, with strong overlap but likely some distinctive characteristics.
The recent films from Grant Horvat, trottiegolf and Fore Play Golf seem to fall into the affiliate bucket, via those funky-looking tracking links — Horvat’s appeal for affiliate marketing purposes is obvious, given his massive growth in popularity over the past three years and his steadfast consistency in delivering the precise format now known far and wide simply as “YouTube Golf”, and Trott is a dyed-in-the-wool TaylorMade ambassador having (per the profile on the TaylorMade website) “spent years on TOUR fitting the best players in the world into TaylorMade equipment”.
Many other YouTube films posted over the past few days appear to fall firmly in a category that’s sideways-related to affiliate but slightly different: influencer.
Horvat, of course, ticks both boxes, affiliate and influencer, in a big way.
But others, such as Rick Shiels — the PGA professional and film-maker who is closing in on three million subscribers on his main YouTube channel and reviews equipment via a separate channel, H.I.T Golf, which has approximately 300,000 YouTube subs — seem to be squarely in the role of influencer here.
These things do overlap, but there are slight differences in the way they’re typically measured.
An affiliate will be judged, at least in part, by the number of purchases, sign-ups or other brand-favorable conversions the affiliate drives. That’s where those odd-looking links come in — from that i366014.net domain on trottiegolf, and in the case of Horvat, a link that redirects through tmgolf.co, a TaylorMade-owned domain where the slug that follows the root domain will power some tracking figures for the business’s internally-focused marketing insights and reports.
For instance, clicking on Grant Horvat’s affiliate link brings you to the Qi35 page on the TaylorMade website but loads of brand-valuable tracking data is being passed through an extensive redirect chain almost completely invisible to the unsuspecting browser.
This is just a brief insight into the modern face of marketing.
While in the past the path to market might have been through some confluence of the pro game, the big media businesses who covered it and those big media businesses’ ad departments, now it’s much more likely to be fragmented through dozens or even hundreds of online influencers.
The number of golf influencers is, of course, growing all the time.
Shiels, Horvat, Peter Finch and Paige Spiranac are just a few of those who have been racking up the views in recent years — and TaylorMade wanted to have as many of golf’s new kingmakers on their side as they prepared to launch the Qi35.
Finally, what about the club itself?
Is it worth the hype?
Almost all those influencers who have been posting content about TaylorMade’s new premium driver have been lavish in their praise for the Qi35.
The numbers in the name Qi35 derive from the three key elements of Form, Fit and Function, while the five relates to the number of driver head variations: the Core, the Max, Max Lite and LS, all designed to appeal to different types of players, and a fifth head which will, per a detailed insider-toned post on Reddit last month:
“has ‘reflectors’ on it which … gives a more accurate read on simulators like GC Quad [but] will only be sent to retailers/fitters for demo.”
Shiels called the new driver “space age”, compared it to something from the year 2035 and said that the “matte finish gives it such a premium feel it looks like the interior of some sort of supercar”.
For much more on all the technical aspects and innovations, the best thing, of course, is Do Your Own Research. That might include browsing some of those videos available via a quick YouTube search, which will give you almost everything you need to know. A great place to start might be Shiels’s extensive 22-minute product review.
The next step for anyone interested in seeing what a space age new driver will do for their game is to head along to your nearest TaylorMade stockist for demo and fitting.
And if you do take that step, then rest assured that an extensive campaign, with a dizzying number of moving parts, has worked its magic on you to get you excited for what this new product could offer.
Lots of marketing these days is heavily dripped in bullsh*t, but let’s give credit where it’s due and offer kudos to TaylorMade, and all their agencies, creatives, co-ordinators and affiliates, on a job brilliantly well done.
Thanks for reading.
Till next time.
Shane