Following the successful launch of the 2024 Tour Championship, the PGA Tour will triple the number of Creators Classics in 2025.
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If one Creator Classic is good, wouldn’t three be better?
At least, that’s what the PGA Tour thinks. On Wednesday morning, the PGA Tour announced that its Impact Golf Championship Series will expand to three events in 2025.
The morning after the well-received launch of TGL, the PGA Tour’s new simulated golf partner, the Tour announced that it will expand the scope of the Classic and broadcast it to a select audience for the first time, thus both venturing into the world of innovative golf formats. The tournament was a huge success. One each for influencer-focused events (Jacksonville and Atlanta) and the Northeast (Philadelphia).
The 2025 iteration of the Creator Classic will be streamed live on YouTube, ESPN+ and Peacock and produced in partnership with content store Pro Shop, in which the PGA Tour has a minority stake and a board seat, according to a press release from the PGA Tour.
It’s unclear exactly who will be participating in the 25th Creators Classic, but it’s reasonable to assume that at least some of the participants will be from the PGA Tour’s new Creators Committee, free of charge The Golf Content Creators Council is advising the Tour on modernizing its media products. The press release mentions that each iteration will have its own “game format, name and field of players.”
By the most objective measures, last August’s Creator Classic trial balloon was a success, providing more than 2.5 million views to the Tour’s YouTube channel and attracting hundreds of thousands of live viewers to the Peacock broadcast. But on a more subjective level, questions remain about bridging the gap between the tour’s traditional telecasts and creators’ traditional YouTube creation methods.
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“It misses what makes us special,” said Garrett Clark, co-founder of Good Good Golf and a star of the first event.
“The struggle is integration [of traditional golf broadcast style and YouTube broadcast style]”,” said Max Putnam, Creative Producer at Good Good. “We talked about how to give it more personality, but it’s something we want to continue to work on. It’s also something I noticed during the Creator Classic and I wanted to see Car cameras, I want to hear them talk.
More broadly, Wednesday’s announcement marks the latest in a series of moves by the PGA Tour to modernize its product in the LIV era. To achieve these goals, the opportunities for growth are many and quite obvious: enhance the Tour’s television broadcasts, increase its YouTube presence, expand its social media presence, and find opportunities to reach those who consume golf through the game’s big creators. The majority of young fans.
The Tour de France has said investment to this end will continue, including the launch of a brand new production facility in Pontevedra Beach at the start of the new year. There’s no denying that the Creator Classic is a flashy investment that serves these purposes.
At the Players Championship in March, we’ll get the first of three chances to see if the crowd agrees.
