For much of its recent history, golf has had a reputation for being somewhat of an old man’s sport. That’s been changing in recent years, and as a result of the sport’s evolving image, some institutional golf brands have undertaken efforts to connect with newer and younger fans.

Good Good Golf, the golf apparel, equipment, and content brand born on YouTube in 2020, is trying to grow in the opposite direction.

“We have done an incredible job reaching that target [audience] that most traditional brands are striving to reach,” Jeffrey Lefkovits, Good Good Golf’s marketing director, told Marketing Brew. “For us, as the market leaders in YouTube golf, in order to reach our growth goals, we also need to figure out, ‘How do we grow outside of that core segment?’ We need to reach some of the traditional golf audiences.”

To do so, Good Good dropped its first-ever brand campaign and a new brand look in January, and it has further plans to cement its place in the legacy of the sport as “more than just YouTube” content, Lefkovits said.

Continue reading here.—AM

In November, the AI startup Anthropic disclosed that a group of hackers had used its Claude agent to target approximately 30 companies and government agencies, describing the incident as what it believed to be “the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention.”

As brands continue to adopt Claude and other AI agents, many marketers are thinking through how to operate them in a safe, low-risk manner. Incorporating agents securely into workflows will require marketers to get their hands dirty playing with agentic AI and navigating the different ways it can be used to assist a campaign, according to experts Marketing Brew spoke with. At the same time, marketers will have to have thorough conversations about how agentic AI can be used in their campaigns.

Compared with GenAI, “agentic [AI] is a little bit newer, and I think there’s still a mix of enthusiasm and fear about what that might mean for the future of work as well as the future of marketing,” Andrew Frank, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said.

Read more here.—JS

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Amanda Bailey is chief client officer of VML. She’s also worked at IN Marketing and Saatchi & Saatchi X.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? I’m part strategic advisor helping brand marketers accelerate growth, part founder setting vision for where commerce is going, part business owner accountable to our P&L, and part leader shaping teams built for what’s next. It’s a lot of hats, but the throughline is shaping what’s next in how brands connect with their customers and helping others do the same.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Two VML campaigns come to mind because together they show what we do best. Oreo Codes took an insight hiding in plain sight—milk barcodes look like stacked Oreos—and turned it into a commerce experience that’s now a multiyear platform—we’ve since found Oreos in website menus, crosswalks, everywhere. Wendy’s is a partnership we’ve built over a decade, from its Fortnite work that won the first-ever Social & Influencer Grand Prix at Cannes to a Facebook strategy so effective Meta adopted it as their Gen Z best practice. What connects them: Culture and commerce aren’t separate disciplines at VML. The best work lives at the intersection—creative that’s built to drive business, not just win awards.

Read more here.

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Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Aflac inked a front-of-kit sponsorship with the NWSL’s expansion team coming to Atlanta in a deal worth $28 million for seven years, which could make it the biggest women’s jersey-patch deal ever.
• OpenAI and Criteo partnered to make ChatGPT ads available to buy through the adtech platform.
• Red Bull reupped its title sponsorship of the Oracle Red Bull Racing F1 team.
• Trump Media & Technology Group is considering spinning off Truth Social into its own publicly traded company.