PGA Tour Retires 20-Year-Old Slogan and Stresses Fans as Much as Players in New Campaign

A few years ago, the PGA Tour put out a series of videos via its YouTube channel. Each was a spotlight of a star player—Dustin Johnson, Luke Donald, Bubba Watson, Matt Kuchar—and each featured the sort of footage fans (that anyone, really) would expect from the world of professional golf: the slow-mo footage of a power drive, the miraculous escape from sand traps, the pristine putts sunk in tight focus. The videos were part of the PGA Tour’s long-running campaign “These Guys Are Good,” and they delivered on that promise. The players were good—the very best—and all those intimate close-ups were a fine way to watch them work. But starting today, the marketing people at the PGA Tour will be doing things a little differently. “These Guys Are Good,” the trusty tagline in service since 1997, is being retired. Taking its place is a new slogan, “Live Under Par.” It marks the start of an ambitious—and, Tour officials hope, ultimately transformative—effort to reinvigorate the PGA Tour’s fan base while simultaneously drawing a new audience. And, given golf's ongoing struggle to regain the glory days of Tiger Woods' dominance, the initiative comes at a critical time. The most noticeable feature of the new campaign, developed with a creative assist from L.A.-based branding and marketing shop Troika, will be to augment the usual content that focuses solely on the technical aspects of play with content that includes softer and more personal elements such as the experiences of the fans who attend tournaments and the lives of the golfers when they’re not playing golf. "'These Guys are Good' did an outstanding service in 20 years to establish the PGA Tour as the preeminent golf league, but it had the camera locked down inside the ropes,” explained PGA Tour CMO Joe Arcuri. “It was more of a spectator view than watching these guys practice their craft. The new campaign goes beyond competition to capture moments [such as] how they interact with fans, and charities. We pulled the camera back and are capturing all those moments that happen week in and week out.” [kickout id="2"] [kickout id="1"] “The campaign is there to pivot the brand, to make it more modern, fresh and fun,” said Gil Haslam, executive creative director at Troika. Having enjoyed going to PGA Tour events himself, Haslam was long frustrated by his having to explain to friends that golf really was exciting to watch. The new campaign, he said, will tap into the personalities and excitement that are already part of pro golf and bring them to audiences via their screen of choice. “The product was always fantastic,” Haslam said. “What we wanted to do was open it up and provide the authentic, 360-degree view.” “Live Under Par” will itself live across all social-media channels in addition to print and TV. The direction of the new creative found its impetus in a comprehensive audience study that revealed, among other things, that while hard-core golf fans look to broadcasts for the technical content you’d expect (“tips” and “advice” for their own games, for instance), another demographic the PGA Tour dubs “Sports Socialites”—and make up nearly a quarter of golf’s viewers—are looking for far more social and interactive content, including “player access” and the chance to “connect to others.” Perhaps most telling is that while older viewers enjoy the usual competitive drama of televised tournaments, younger viewers are looking for “social connections” and for the players to be “relatable.” With clear proof that fans are likely to embrace a more social and participatory approach, the new creative is heavy on audience-reaction shots and liberally peppered with Twitter exchanges posted in real time during play. According to Haslam, the social element also stresses an important attribute that allows the PGA Tour to trounce nearly all other live sporting events—the ability of fans to stand near the players they admire. “No other sport can get you this close,” Haslam said. “You’re right next to the player who’s about to hit the ball. You can root for them, and that proximity is nowhere else.” Like, say, an NFL game. “You’re not out there [on the field] with Tom Brady in between passes,” Haslam said. With golf, however, “the proximity is amazing. It’s a powerful connection of players to fans.” [kickout id="5"] Perhaps the most enduring connection the PGA Tour hopes to make is with the “Live Under Par” tagline itself, a double entendre that refers both to playing golf and living life off the green. “We wanted something that was a call to action and that was ownable and unique to golf,” Arcuri said. Added Haslam: "It’s something that transcends golf and find itself into fans [who’ll think], ‘I may not play as often as these guys, but I can live this same spirit of striving and pursuing greatness every day in what I do.'" No time to putter around If the new marketing and the slogans do indeed forge a new connection with fans, there’s arguably never been a more critical time to do it. As an event people watch, golf has seen better days. For example, while the 2018 Masters that just wrapped up on Sunday drew just over 13 million viewers (an 18 percent increase in viewership over 2017), golf has nonetheless struggled to draw the audiences it did a decade ago when Tiger Woods was in his prime. According to Sports Media Watch, viewership for this year’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am was down 18 percent from last year, and 28 percent from 2016. (In fairness, that tournament was airing at the same time as the PyeongChang Olympics.) While the PGA Tour admittedly faces many of the same problems that televised sports like baseball and football do—namely that the attention spans of younger viewers are shortening all the time, and TV viewership overall has been slipping—golf’s problems are also clearly more systemic. Criticized for its slow pace and costly fees and equipment, golf has yet to shake off the stigma that it’s the sport of choice for rich white men. In 2015, then-candidate Donald Trump rankled many in professional golf when he told Fortune, "Let golf be elitist. … Because of the expense of playing, and the land needed, golf is never going to be basketball, where all you need is a court." While “Live Under Par” is the new corporate crusade for the PGA Tour only—its remit does not extend to correcting all of golf’s existential woes—veteran marketer Mario Natarelli believes the new campaign will nevertheless have to contend with broad-scale perceptions of the game overall. And he believes that stronger measures than "Live Under Par" are needed to do that. “This doesn’t strike me as the kind of campaign I’d create in the kind of turmoil and trouble that the PGA is in,” said Natarelli, managing partner of MBLM, who has worked on professional golf marketing efforts in the past. While “Live Under Par” gives a long-overdue nod to fan participation, he said, the tagline itself also “just reinforces the elitist aspect [of golf]—it’s slow, expensive and exclusionary.” Because the new campaign stresses audience experience and participation, it bears noting that the PGA Tour did adjust its smartphone policy to allow fans to take photos and shoot video of the tournament action, though this relaxation of the old restrictions appeared only last summer. For his part, Joe Favorito, who teaches sports marketing at Columbia University, believes “Live Under Par” is a solid step in the right direction. While Favorito pointed out that he’s more excited by the young faces he saw playing at the Masters over the weekend, “a new campaign that also showcases the depth and breath of the fan experience makes sense as well, since the fun that goes on outside the lines and those passionate personalities who play the game even casually, is also a good part of the narrative.” “Golf has some great stories to tell,” Favorito adds, “so mixing the consumer and the star is a new and well planned take.” Time alone will reveal if this new marketing effort—the first in a generation—will itself come in under par, or not. [kickout id="3"]