Preston McClellan

I see that @instagram decided to turn the story ads dial up to 10. 2-3 organic stories followed by at least two story ads right now. What a fantastic user experience. 🙄

Do we have more economic freedom/opportunities/ways to make money? Yes. Too bad inflation has wiped out those gains for the vast majority of people under ~45-50.

Hahaha. Jaguars. So funny but so good.

Eternally grateful for @RazorbackFB hiring Silverfield so that @MemphisFB could get a real coach. The difference this year is wild under Huff. So fun to watch a well coached team

Team golf does a great job exposing the reality of professional golf: EVERYONE, literally every pro (especially anyone remotely close to qualifying for these events), is insanely good. The difference between the 250th player in the world and the 10th is wildly small. Over 72 holes, the better ranked golfer usually wins. Hell, even in a 36 hole match play setting like USGA Championships, the better ranked golfer wins overwhelmingly. 18 holes in a team setting on a course that neither side has any experience on? It’s far more wide open than people think.

That’s such an obvious wrong call in the Memphis game. Is that not reviewable?

Curious what people think. Would you rather have a tour player with 2M followers who mentions your brand twice a year, or 200k who genuinely plays your product and says so unprompted? I know my answer. I am more interested in whether the brand side agrees.

Most golf sponsorships are priced on exposure and renewed on relationships. Neither of those is value.

Built a six month social review for a tour player broken out by sponsor. Per-partner, not aggregate. It made some partnerships look worse. That was the point. Naming the underperforming one is what makes the strong numbers believable.

If a partnership cannot fail, it also cannot succeed. It can only continue. Write the failure condition into the deal. Most uncomfortable slide in the deck and the most valuable.

We launched a top player's account from zero and the hardest part was not the content. It was convincing everyone that the account should sound like her and not like a brand safety document. Personality is not a risk to manage. It is the asset you are paying for.

Athlete social gets sanded down by committee. Agent wants one thing. Sponsors want another. The tour has guidelines. What comes out is technically compliant and completely forgettable.

Sponsors keep buying golfers by follower count and keep being disappointed. The two facts are related. Follower count tells you how many people could see something. It tells you nothing about whether they will do anything, and in golf the gap between those numbers is enormous. A player with 200,000 engaged followers who genuinely uses your product will out-convert a player with two million who mentions you in a swipe-up twice a year. Every time. It is not close. This keeps happening because follower count is easy to put in a deck and relevance is not. So build the harder deck. Engagement by post type. Audience overlap with your actual buyer. How the athlete talks when nobody is paying them to talk. The partnerships that work are the ones you could have guessed before they were announced.

Golf properties are storytelling machines that have never been asked a question. We spent a full day at a private club just walking the grounds with the people who work there. Every usable idea in the final cut came from that day. None were in the brief.

The best thing about golf's shoulder season is that players will actually talk to you. Same person, same question, October versus May. Completely different answer. Access is not a credential. It is a calendar.

Tournament week and the best content on my timeline is a caddie's phone video from a range session. Zero production value. More engagement than anything the broadcast put out today. Access beats budget. It is not close.

Raw enough to feel like access. Clean enough to run as brand. That is the whole brief. Most golf content picks one and wonders why it underperforms.

Production truth nobody puts in the deck. The shot you planned for six weeks will be fine. The shot somebody grabbed walking to the parking lot will run everywhere. Budget for the plan. Leave room for the parking lot.

10.6M impressions. 4,492 new followers. One tournament week. The number I care about is not the 10.6. It is that this event has grown year over year on every major metric since we started. That means it was not a viral week. It was a system.

The most valuable content in golf is not the shot. It is the ninety seconds before the shot. Broadcast owns the shot. It always will and it should. Which means every brand chasing swing footage is competing with a machine that has forty cameras and a helicopter. The range session. The caddie conversation. The walk from nine to ten. The practice round on Tuesday when a player is loose and actually talking. That is uncontested territory, and it is where people decide whether they like someone. We were among the first creative teams working under the PGA Tour's redefined media guidelines and the thing that surprised people was not the access. It was how ordinary the best material was. A player joking with his caddie outran a highlight every single time. Fans do not follow athletes for the golf. They follow them for the person, and then the golf means something. Stop trying to out-broadcast the broadcast.