Golf announcers aren’t really known for being the loudest or most energetic.
That doesn’t quite match the vibe of Topgolf, the high-tech sports entertainment chain that’s been part of the push in recent years to modernize the game of golf and make it less stuffy. So instead of tapping any human golf personalities for its summer campaign, Topgolf made its own: Chaz Mulligan and Birdie Baker, puppets created in collaboration with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the visual effects and puppetry studio founded by the creator of the Muppets.
“We’re just having fun with the idea of the golf broadcast,” Topgolf Chief Brand Officer Geoff Cottrill told Marketing Brew. “We consider [Chaz and Birdie] two new friends, and they’re offering us a lot of opportunities to connect with new people and encourage people to play.”
In addition to the eclectic announcers, Topgolf has a few other tricks up its sleeve this summer and beyond, all of which are focused on positioning golf as fun and accessible.
Not too stuffy
Chaz and Birdie are featured in the latest iteration of Topgolf’s “Come Play Around” campaign, which started in 2022 and is all about “offering an open invitation for anybody and everybody to come play around with us,” Cottrill said. The puppets made their debut in early June and have so far appeared in a few ads for the brand.
The Topgolf team ultimately decided to use spokespuppets instead of people because they wanted to work with new and flexible personalities as opposed to working around existing public figures, Cottrill said. When Topgolf’s agency, Anomaly, approached the Jim Henson Creature Shop with the idea, they agreed almost immediately, and came up with Chaz and Birdie in just a couple of days, he said.
On set, Chaz and Birdie bring an element of joy to commercial shoots, which can typically be draining, Cottrill said; after two days shooting at Topgolf’s Pompano Beach, Florida, location, “I didn’t want it to end,” he said. The team was left with enough usable ad-libbed content that they even released a blooper reel of the puppets.
Beyond their ad appearances, the puppets are becoming part of Topgolf’s corporate culture. They showed up at Topgolf’s bring-your-child-to-work day, and at a recent company meeting—where they heckled Cottrill while he was in the middle of a presentation, he said.
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“I think in other places in my career, if I’d have shown up on stage with a couple of puppets, people would have been like, ‘What’s happening?’” he said. “They wouldn’t have gotten the joke. Here, everybody was just delighted.”
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Laughter might make for the best medicine, but ice cream may be an even better cure for this summer’s high temperatures, and as part of its summer marketing push, a Topgolf-branded ice-cream truck is making its way from California to Massachusetts and stopping to hand out free ice cream along the way. As of mid-July, the truck had been on the road for just a couple weeks, and had already clocked more than 4,000 miles and handed out more than 6,000 treats, according to Cottrill.
“We just want to make you smile,” he said of the initiative. “We just want to have some fun and remind you to play.”
So far, Cottrill said he’s been “very happy with the results” of the summer campaign, although he declined to share specific numbers, as Topgolf is a publicly traded company in the middle of a fiscal quarter. Topgolf’s same-venue sales were down 7% in the first quarter compared to the same time in 2023, when there was a spike in corporate events post-Covid, the company noted in its most recent earnings report.
Summer is a big season for the brand, and Topgolf has been spending more on marketing this summer than it did a year ago, according to Cottrill. More is soon on the way: The company is debuting a new product in early August, and it’s also set to soon become an officially sanctioned, medaled event in the Special Olympics.
“We’re not going to take our foot off the gas,” he said.
As for Chaz and Birdie, their gigs as Topgolf announcers have no end in sight, although they may soon have company in the booth. The Topgolf and Jim Henson teams are planning to introduce additional puppet characters down the line, perhaps starting with a golf groundskeeper, Cottrill said.
“The puppets give us creative license to expand, and just have some fun,” he said. “People come to laugh, and they come to have fun, and that’s what we’re here to do.”