The conventional wisdom in sports marketing holds that certainty sells — the winning shot, the triumphant finish, the product that performs exactly as promised. A new documentary from TaylorMade, the golf equipment maker, suggests that uncertainty might sell rather well too.
"Finding Fast," a long-form film created to introduce the company's Qi4D driver, has accumulated more than 10 million views in under two months, a considerable haul for what amounts to a piece of branded content about the inside of a golf club. The film was produced by Zambezi, the Los Angeles agency, and directed by an unnamed filmmaker who served as his own director of photography — a choice made, he said, to narrow the distance between camera and subject.
The approach represents something of a departure for TaylorMade, which is based in Carlsbad, Calif., and has long been known for marketing that emphasizes technological precision and tour-player endorsements. Rather than showcase the finished product, "Finding Fast" dwells on the engineering team's setbacks, rollbacks and what the director called "constant negotiation with what isn't working yet."
(Whether this constitutes radical transparency or merely a new flavor of brand storytelling is perhaps a question for the viewer.)
The production itself embraced the same improvisational spirit, with crews dispatched to capture actual equipment-testing sessions where professional golfers decided in real time whether to adopt the new driver. Jay Morrison, a creative director at Zambezi, oversaw the project alongside producer Pia-Louise Lauritsen.
"We kept repeating the phrase 'heavy is the crown' during production," the director said, in the kind of statement that sounds more profound on a film set than it reads in a trade publication.
The result is a film that treats tour players, equipment fitters and engineers with roughly equal screen time — a flattening of the usual hierarchy in which the celebrity golfer speaks and everyone else remains decorously offscreen.
That 10 million people chose to watch a documentary about driver development suggests either a genuine appetite for process-oriented storytelling or a very large number of golfers with time on their hands. Possibly both.