For a retailer that has spent decades as the UK’s quiet infrastructure of the game — the place you go for clubs, balls, and waterproofs rather than inspiration — launching a first-ever brand campaign is a significant act of ambition. Does it land? Mostly, yes.
The Brief
American Golf did not arrive at brand advertising by accident or ego. It arrived there because the ground beneath it shifted.
Golf in the UK is not merely doing well — it is, by any reasonable measure, experiencing a cultural moment of unusual intensity.
The retailer’s own data tells a vivid story: searches for “golf beginner courses” have surged 551% in the past year. “Beginner golf” is up 36% in a single month.
In-store sales of women’s apparel and footwear have risen 39% as female participation scales at a rate the sport has not seen before.
Post-Masters search traffic is spiking. TikTok tutorials are being consumed by people who have never held a seven-iron.
This is the context in which We’re Obsessed Too was born — and it is the right context at the right moment.
When a market expands this rapidly, the challenge for the incumbent category leader is not to keep existing customers. It is to define the terms on which new ones enter.
American Golf, which operates more than 95 stores across the UK and Ireland and generates roughly £135 million in annual turnover, is better-placed than anyone to do this.
But being best placed and being best known are different things. Until now, the brand has let its store footprint do the talking.
The campaign represents a recognition that a footprint alone does not build an emotional franchise.
The timing also carries another dimension. In February 2026, the business was acquired by Peter Jones CBE, the entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den regular who described the purchase as driven by “both personal passion and long-term commercial opportunity.”
New ownership frequently catalyzes brand investment — the desire to signal momentum, to reframe the story.
A first-ever brand campaign arriving within weeks of a high-profile change of hands is not coincidental.
The Creative
The 175-second TVC opens not with sweeping fairways or the aspirational hush of Augusta, but with something more honest and more interesting: the quiet colonization of ordinary life by golf obsession.
The brand’s own YouTube description frames it precisely — “No matter how you play, this game has a way of sneaking in and taking over everything. If compulsive practice swings, TikTok tips, and late-night range sessions have become a part of your routine, you’re not alone. We’re obsessed, too.”
This is smart positioning. Rather than standing above its audience and gesturing grandly toward the beauty of the game, American Golf places itself alongside it — a fellow traveler in the peculiar mania that golf induces.
The tone is conspiratorial rather than authoritative.
It acknowledges the somewhat ridiculous reality of being a golfer: the chip shot rehearsed in the kitchen, the YouTube rabbit holes at midnight, the obsessive tinkering with grip and stance that non-golfers regard with baffled sympathy.
The “Too” in the title is doing meaningful work.
It is not We’re Obsessed. It is We’re Obsessed Too — a small but deliberate word that shifts the brand from vendor to compatriot.
American Golf is not selling you equipment from a retail perspective. It is telling you it understands the condition from the inside.
Creatively, the film leans into the cultural textures that define contemporary golf participation: the TikTok tip-watching, the late-night range sessions, the beginner stumbling onto something they cannot quite explain but cannot stop pursuing.
This is golf as it is actually lived in 2026 — democratized, digitally mediated, diverse — rather than golf as its heritage imagery would have it.
Notably absent are the usual markers of golf advertising: the pristine course at golden hour, the celebrity pro, the trophy presentation.
This is golf as an itch you cannot stop scratching.
The production is clean and confident, with a pace that earns its nearly three-minute runtime by continually finding new ways to illustrate the central insight.
Whether it sustains its energy through the full cut or whether a tighter edit would serve better is a legitimate question — long-form brand TVCs require each scene to justify its presence, and a few sequences feel more illustrative than essential.
But for a debut brand outing, the ambition of the running length signals conviction, and conviction in a first campaign matters.
The Strategy
The campaign extends beyond the film into a nationwide events program running from April to August — beginner and high-handicap coaching sessions, women-focused fittings and product testing, tech-led innovation experiences.
This is shrewd. A brand campaign that exists only as a film risks being perceived as an advertisement.
A campaign that becomes a series of physical encounters creates proof points.
The events activate the brand’s core retail advantage — expertise, range, physical presence — in a mode that feels generous rather than transactional.
The women’s strand is particularly well-judged.
Women golfers are the fastest-growing demographic in the sport, and American Golf’s 39% increase in women’s in-store apparel and footwear sales signals genuine commercial momentum.
Custom fittings, influencer appearances, and product testing sessions are not revolutionary, but they are the right moves executed at the right moment.
The question is whether the execution will match the intent — whether these events feel like spaces women actually want to be in, or whether they default to a feminized version of the same experience the brand has always offered men.
The decision to frame the campaign around obsession rather than aspiration is strategically sound. Golf advertising has long defaulted to aspiration: the perfect shot, the perfect course, the perfect self.
Obsession is different — it is more honest, more inclusive, and more resonant with the reality of how people actually fall for the game.
You do not aspire to play golf. You get bitten by it. American Golf is naming that experience, and in naming it, claiming it.
Marketing & CRM Director Scott Taylor articulates the brief with admirable clarity: the surge in interest among beginners demands a brand that offers “tools, coaching, and inspiration” rather than simply inventory.
We’re Obsessed Too is, at its best, the emotional expression of that positioning.
The Verdict
This is a confident and culturally literate debut. It does not attempt to do everything — it does not position American Golf as a lifestyle brand or retrofit it with premiumization — and it is stronger for that discipline.
The insight is genuine, the tone is right, and the timing is excellent.
The campaign arrives at the moment of maximum cultural permission: when the market is growing, when new demographics are entering the game, and when a new chapter of ownership gives the brand reason to speak loudly.
The weaknesses are those of most first-brand campaigns: a slight tendency to enumerate the audience rather than truly inhabit one person’s experience, and an events program whose quality will ultimately determine whether the campaign builds lasting brand equity or dissipates as goodwill.
The film, for all its energy, would benefit from a tighter cut in some broadcast contexts.
But these are refinements, not failures.
For a retailer that has built a business on knowing golfers better than almost anyone in the UK, We’re Obsessed Too is a worthy first expression of what it means to not just serve the golf community but to belong to it.
Brand: American Golf Campaign: We’re Obsessed Too Agency: Not disclosed Medium: TVC, nationwide events (April–August 2026) Verdict: ★★★★☆