On Friday, Good Good Golf, the YouTube channel that grew into a real equipment and apparel brand, posted a 15-second ad for its new $650 co-branded Callaway Golf driver, the Quantum Max Good Good. In it, Good Good creator Garrett Clark runs over and shoves fellow talent Alexis Miestowski to the ground as she reaches for the club, then stands over her: "Do not touch my new driver." The caption was "You have been warned…"

The ad ran on Callaway's channels as well as Good Good's, a detail that will matter in a minute. The backlash was pretty much immediate. Skratch's Claire Rogers called it "very scary" and asked what young girls are supposed to think when they see it; her colleague Nicole Rae said it "endorses violence against women in the scariest and most threatening way." By Friday evening both companies had taken the video down and then an apology on Saturday.

What's interesting here is comparing the statements, because each company decided whose crisis this should be. Good Good, on X: "We posted a video to our channels that ultimately depicted actions that are not aligned with our values as a brand. We have since taken that content down, and sincerely apologize." First person, we posted it, we took it down, we're sorry.

Callaway, through a spokesperson: "disappointed by the content that was posted" and "appreciative of Good Good for addressing this." Passive voice, grading from the sidelines, about an ad for Callaway's own club that ran on Callaway's own channels. When Front Office Sports asked how involved Callaway was in making the ad, the company didn't answer. The PGA Tour, which has Good Good as title sponsor of a Tour event this November and at least one women's-safety group publicly calling for it to cut ties, told Golf Digest it does "not condone violence in any form."

The business context is what makes this a strategy problem and not just an influencer mess. Women are now 28 percent of on-course golfers in the US, the highest share on record, and Good Good's VP of brand and marketing told Front Office Sports in July that the company is making a "conscious effort" to grow its women's business, built around the Good Good Girls channel where Miestowski is one of the founding faces. The woman shoved in the ad is part of the growth plan, and as of Monday night she hasn't said anything publicly. Meanwhile Callaway's statement says it "look[s] forward to working together," so the partnership survives another day.

Now this wasn't a creator going rogue; it was produced brand content for a $650 product and it ran on Callaway's own accounts which means whatever review it was given, it passed. That's the uncomfortable part here. The room didn't lack judgment, it lacked range. Everyone who saw that spot before the public shared the same frame of reference: golf bros, bit culture, YouTube physicality — so the shove read as a gag to every one of them. Brand vibe fluency is knowing what the audience inside the joke feels but brand risk fluency is knowing what someone outside the joke sees.

This is a great case study in why it's important to have diverse perspectives on your team.

Quick catch-up if you're just joining this one. A massive storm hit northwest Indiana on August 11 and knocked out power to some 374,500 customers of NIPSCO, the local utility. Two weeks later, parts of Gary, the hardest-hit city, nearly 80 percent Black, are still dark.

On the ground there are downed trees and branches still covering sidewalks, schools that closed during the outages reopening on delays, families who spent hundreds on generators, throwing out everything in their refrigerators, and National Guard crews clearing more than 350 blocked roads so line trucks can get through.

Since we wrote about this last week, the company put a senior leader out front, Melody Birmingham, the utilities president at parent company NiSource, who has been saying reasonable things. The damage is a rebuild, not a repair, explaining constraints ("lines that ordinarily take us … weeks or months that we are trying to accomplish in days or weeks") and, per NBC Chicago, "my team heard loud and clear that better communication is needed and we agree." The company then met with Gary's ministers. All necessary but not at all sufficient.

The order of events tells us everything here.

NIPSCO originally promised everyone would have power back by Friday at 11:59 pm. It gave up on that deadline two days early on Wednesday and then the company put out a new schedule that had most of Gary and Portage waiting until Tuesday night, a full two weeks after the storm. NIPSCO's explanation is physics, and it may be right, but this is also at least the third version of the schedule. As of yesterday morning, about 10,700 customers were still out, though only around 3,900 of those trace back to the original storm; the rest came from a second storm that hit over the weekend. Two-thirds of what's left is in Gary.

While the dates kept slipping, the story stopped belonging to NIPSCO.

Saturday, Gov. Mike Braun posted: "Bring in more crews. Put every available resource into the field. Get creative. Get the job done. Hoosiers have waited long enough." Sunday, he sent in the National Guard and called NIPSCO "a monopoly with a responsibility to ratepayers." On Monday, he went after funding and filed a formal complaint with Indiana's utility regulator arguing that, since 2016, NIPSCO customers have been billed $2.3 billion for promised grid improvements, including more than $81 million over the past three years just for tree trimming. Did the work get done? "NIPSCO has failed to keep its end of the bargain," Braun said.

Meanwhile, Bernice King wrote that Black communities "have too often been expected to endure conditions that would be treated as intolerable somewhere else," and NPR noticed that on day one of the outage, NiSource declared its regular quarterly dividend, roughly $140 million to shareholders.

Now read NIPSCO's response to the investigation, because it tells you who the company thinks its audience is. The statement says NIPSCO "will continue to communicate with Governor Braun's office and the Commission," that it "values the regulatory process and will cooperate fully if the Commission were to open an investigation," and that it is "committed to transparency and cooperation." Every sentence is addressed to the governor and the regulator. There is nothing in it for the people still sitting in the dark and notice the change in voice: for a week the company's face was a named executive saying "we heard you." The moment the regulator showed up, she disappeared and an unsigned statement full of process language took her place which is the signal that lawyers took the pen. What it adds up to is a company running a competent normal-storm playbook, with the comms and legal tracks no longer in step, in a crisis that stopped being normal a week ago.

Here's what's still missing entirely: any attempt to make customers whole. NIPSCO has suspended disconnections and co-hosted water-and-charging events, and its website points people to the Red Cross, 211, and food-stamp replacement which is helpful, but mostly other people's money. Its own FAQ pre-answers the compensation question: storms are "an act of nature, so we do not reimburse customers for damages to property or food spoilage."

Other utilities have found more. After Tropical Storm Isaias in 2020, PSEG Long Island reimbursed customers up to $250 per household for spoiled food; Con Edison resisted until New York's attorney general forced out more than $530,000 in payments, and New York then wrote reimbursement into law. PG&E gave $100 bill credits after its 2019 blackouts once Gov. Newsom demanded it. Michigan now requires automatic credits of $42 per day for extended outages, and in the UK storm payments are the law, about $100 after the first day without power, more every six hours after. Notice the pattern: almost none of it was voluntary. A monopoly's customers can't leave, so the market a utility answers to isn't customers, it's regulators and politicians, which is exactly who NIPSCO's statement was written for.

The cautionary tale here is CenterPoint after Hurricane Beryl in Houston: no credits, no reimbursements and what followed was a year of legislative hearings, a state investigation, an audit, and a withdrawn rate increase that ended with the company settling for a rate cut. Refusing to pay didn't save money because it just got rerouted through the regulator, with interest. NIPSCO should study that math closely, because it has a $741 million gas-infrastructure spending plan pending before the same commission Braun just pointed at, plus a statewide affordability investigation already underway.

In a restoration crisis, the timeline you've committed to is the entire message. Nobody remembers the language with empathy but everybody remembers Friday, 11:59 pm. If your operations can't stand behind a date, say so: "Gary is a rebuild and we'll have a firm date Thursday." Comms should never be the only department defending a number that operations picked. Always push your team on where your public dates come from and who signs off before they publish.

And when performance has failed this badly, words stop working altogether and the only credible message left is money and material help. The argument comms should be making inside NIPSCO this week isn't for "better communication" but that a food-spoilage reimbursement program is a strategic and useful way forward, and the CenterPoint example shows the price of the alternative.