The PGA Tour Creators Council will bring a group of influencers to the table to discuss content insights.
Alex Gelman, GOLF | Getty Images
The PGA Tour can smelt your eyes roll.
For all its (sometimes) weak corporate power, the Tour doesn’t need new ones chief marketing officer Andy Weitz know that Friday morning’s news — announcing the creation of the all-new “Creator’s Council” — will be met with a healthy dose of snark.
If a business’s most sacred responsibility is to understand the consumer, then the PGA Tour knows it’s not for everyone. In fact, she knows that a crossover episode between the Tour and golf’s most prominent influencers goes down with a certain subsection of the core demographic like a 6-iron to the skull.
But critically, the Tour also understands the crisis facing professional golf. The symptoms of this disease are many – the explosion of LIV, the entry of billions of cheating people into golf, the slow decline of the golf TV product, the generation of the class of the game and the loss of Tiger Woods – but the result is one: After Five Decades of rapid growth, pro golf is catching on and its the audience is shrinking.
This is it why the Tour is okay with a few eye rolls Friday morning, the same day it announced a partnership with seven golf social media brands to form an all-new “Creator Council,” in which influencers will share strategy and knowledge with the exchange tour for expanded access to events and opportunities for content creation. The group is expected to meet regularly with PGA Tour executive leadership including Weitz to discuss fan engagement opportunities, content strategy and broadcast enhancements, among other topics.
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The deal is old-fashioned what for what – there is no money and it is not necessary. For the tournament, the benefits of pairing nearly limitless scale with the institutional content knowledge of the creator community are obvious. For those who love golf enough to earn the “content creator” job title, the perks of working with the Tour are even better: exclusive access to content from highly regulated long stretches of PGA Tour events and a taste of the viral-ready content that comes with it.
That may not sound like a lot, but it was enough to sign up partners who reached more than 15 million followers, including Bryan Bros Golf, Erik Anders Lang, Foreplay/Barstool Sports, No Laying Up, Paige Spiranac, Roger Steele and Tisha Alyn . .
“We want to learn from the creators,” Weitz told GOLF.com. “First, we want to give them access (to us), because we recognize that there are some places where we can do better with our voice. Second, there are opportunities where we can co-create and give fans even more of what they want. And third, there may be situations where creators need to lead, and we need to give them access to our platform to do that.”
The program marks the continuation of the PGA Tour’s recent move into new media, where content creators have found many eager new fans to watch golf content, challenging the sport’s reputation as an old man’s game. Introducing a portion of this digital audience to the Tour represents a massive opportunity for the Tour’s business, which derives the vast majority of its annual revenue from media rights deals tied to the size of its television audience. At the simplest level, more followers and subscribers mean more fans, and fans are good for business.
The possibility helps to explain the Tour’s last test balloons as The classic creatoran influential television appearance that attracted several million views, and Skratch, a digital media brand whose revival under Full motion Chad Mama EP received millions in seed funding from Turi. It also explains some of the key parts of the Creators Council, which include expanding the Creators Classic to other Tour events and working to ease media regulations.
Notably, many of the original Creators Council guests come from the booming world of YouTube golf. In a major ironic twist, the PGA Tour’s official YouTube pages (1.5 million) have fewer followers than former PGA Tour member Bryson DeChambeau (1.63 million), who left the tour for LIV in part to cultivate a presence his in the media. DeChambeau may stand out among his professional golf peers for his spectacular skills, and YouTube’s algorithm may boost individual creators, but there’s little debate on either side that the tour’s combined power presents an opportunity for an audience. on YouTube several times larger than any other. individual player.
There are still questions about the ultimate value of a large YouTube audience — many creators say the most profitable parts of their business are merchandise sales and direct sponsorships, not YouTube ad dollars — but there’s little doubt that every grain eye makes sense for the PGA Tour in these days of declining ratings and tournament wars.
“This idea did not start with the business case. This idea started with an opportunity to better understand what our fans want from the PGA Tour,” Weitz said. “If we get it right with fans, if we understand how they’re consuming content and how they’re engaging with other aspects of golf landscape, we can ultimately serve them better. And yes, it will be better for our business. But it’s about changing the way we think about engaging with our fan base.”
engagement has been a household word at Tour HQ this fall, especially when Weitz and Co. work through the results of the first Fan Forward survey – a pilot program designed to get fan feedback on PGA Tour broadcasts. In that sense, the Creator’s Council represents an extension of the effort, this time aimed at getting feedback from some of the tour’s most valuable outsiders.
