The PGA Tour’s newest business partners? Influencers

The PGA Tour can feel your eyes rolling.

For all its (sometimes) stodgy corporate might, the Tour doesn’t need new chief marketing officer Andy Weitz to know that Friday morning’s news — announcing the creation of the all-new “Creator Council” — will go over with a healthy dose of snark.

If a business’s most holy responsibility is to understand the consumer, then the PGA Tour knows this one isn’t for everyone. In fact, it knows a crossover episode between the Tour and golf’s most prominent influencers lands with a certain subsection of the core demographic like a 6-iron to the skull.

But critically, the Tour also grasps the crisis facing professional golf. The symptoms of this disease are many — the explosion of LIV, the intrusion of rogue billions into golf, the slow decline of the golf TV product, the genericization of the playing class and the loss of Tiger Woods — but the result is singular: After five decades of precipitous growth, pro golf is seizing, and its audience is shrinking.

That’s why the Tour is okay with a few eye rolls on Friday morning, the same day it announced a partnership with seven golf social media brands to form the all-new “Creator Council,” in which influencers will trade strategy and insight with the Tour in exchange for enhanced access to events and content creation opportunities. 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.

Like what you’re reading? Sign up for the Hot Mic Newsletter here.

The agreement is an old-fashioned quid pro quo — no money is involved, and it isn’t needed. For the Tour, the benefits of pairing near-limitless scale with the institutional content knowledge of the creator community are obvious. For those who love golf enough to land the job title of “content creator,” the benefits of working with the Tour are even better: exclusive content access from the long heavily regulated fairways of PGA Tour events, and a taste of the oodles of viral-ready content that come with it.

That might not sound like much, but it was enough to get partners totaling more than 15 million followers to sign up, 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 creators,” Weitz told GOLF.com. “First, we want to give them access [to us], because we acknowledge there are some places where we can do better with our own voice. Second, there are opportunities where we can co-create, and give the fan even more of what they want. And then third, there might be situations where the creators should 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 lurch toward new media, where content creators have found scores of young fans eager to watch golf content, defying the sport’s reputation as an old man’s game. Introducing some of that digital audience to the Tour represents a massive opportunity for the Tour business, which collects the vast majority of its annual revenue from media rights agreements tied to the size of its TV audiences. At the simplest level, more followers and subscribers means more fans, and fans are good for business.

The opportunity helps to explain recent Tour trial balloons like the Creator Classic, a televised influencer outing that drew several million views, and Skratch, a digital media brand whose resuscitation under Full Swing EP Chad Mumm received millions in seed funding from the Tour. It also explains some of the core pieces of the Creator Council, which include expanding the Creator Classic to additional Tour events and working to loosen media regulations.

Notably, many of the Creator Council’s initial invitees come from the booming world of YouTube golf. In a chief piece of irony, the PGA Tour’s official YouTube handles (1.5 million) have fewer followers than former PGA Tour member Bryson DeChambeau (1.63 million), who departed the Tour for LIV in part to cultivate his own media presence. DeChambeau may be an outlier among his pro golfer counterparts for his showmanship, and the YouTube algorithm might boost individual creators, but there is little debate from either side that the combined might of the Tour presents an opportunity for a YouTube audience several times larger than any individual player.

There are still questions about the ultimate value of a large YouTube audience — many creators say the most profitable pieces of their business are merchandise sales and direct sponsorships, not YouTube ad dollars — but there is little doubt that every eyeball has meaning to the PGA Tour in these days of sagging ratings and tour wars.

“This idea didn’t 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 the golf landscape, we can ultimately serve them better. And yes, that will be better for our business. But this is about changing the way we think about engaging with our fan base.”

Engagement has been a popular word at Tour HQ this fall, particularly as Weitz and Co. work through the results of the first-ever Fan Forward survey — a pilot program designed to get fan feedback on PGA Tour broadcasts. In that sense, the Creator Council represents an extension of the efforts, this time aimed at sourcing feedback from some of the Tour’s most valuable outsiders.

NEWSLETTER

Sign up for GOLF’s Hot Mic Newsletter!

Want exclusive golf media news in your inbox? Sign up for the Hot Mic Newsletter with James Colgan!

SIGN UP

Of course, there is a competitive advantage to the Council. LIV’s YouTube inroads are not small, and the league’s players have taken advantage of partnerships with some of YouTube golf’s biggest names already. (Last week, Phil Mickelson announced a two-on-two content series alongside uber-popular YouTuber Grant Horvat.) By securing a group working with the Tour, the Tour isn’t just gaining strategic insights, it’s also protecting its own rear end. But it also isn’t as simple as currying favor — some of the Tour’s inaugural councilmen and women have also been some of its most vocal critics over the last several years.

“Ultimately, this is about the forum,” Weitz said. “This is about creating a place where creators can come together with the Tour, we can learn from each other, and we can do better on behalf of fans.”

The Council might not ultimately yield much in the way of progress. Some issues inherent to the PGA Tour media business, like commercials, are responsible for the vast sums of money the Tour generates. Other issues, like managing the haves and have-nots of PGA Tour media regulations, could prove a considerable headache for Tour brass. But if nothing else, Friday’s announcement points to tangible evidence the Tour is acting to address the most flagrant issues plaguing its existence in the LIV era.

That might not be everything you’re looking for, but it’s something — and right now something is good.

Even if it makes your eyes roll.

If you liked what you read, sign up for the Hot Mic Newsletter here. You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.