OCALA, Fla. - Brooke Pancake arrived on the driving range on Monday at the Coates Golf Championship and found competitors who wasted no time with small chat. They were all curious about one thing: Where is the new bag?
Pancake generated national interest last week at the PGA Show when she announced that Waffle House would be her new bag sponsor, a delicious piece of irony perfect for a Pancake that has always preferred waffles anyways. All the players were aware of the new sponsorship.
Each can be accounted for in the 71 million digital impressions generated already, according to Waffle House estimates. They projected another seven million TV impressions and that’s not even factoring in the reach on social media. In other words, Brooke Waffle or WaHo, as her competitors are now calling her, went viral, and everyone wanted a piece.
Her phone blew up that morning with clips from Good Morning America and the Today Show discussing her and waffles.
“There’s a lot of people I know that probably don’t know as much about golf but woke up, had their coffee and watched Good Morning America and they were like ‘O my gosh!’ I got a bunch of the recorded clippings from people that were like I can’t believe this,” Pancake said.
So did NBC Nightly News, NPR, ESPN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post among others with each headline or lead-in seeming to top the previous one.
“There were a lot of great headlines. I know ESPN was like Brooke Pancake Betrays Her Own Breakfast food,” Pancake said. “There were some pretty clever ones.”
The partnership came to be through a family she stayed with at the Meijer LPGA Classic Presented by Kraft. The family she stayed with connected her with a great friend of theirs who got to know her and knew the founder of Waffle House and set up the meeting with them. Waffle House took to it immediately, and when the partnership was finalized in November, she anxiously awaited the announcement at the PGA Show. The upcoming media blitz? Not even she could have predicted that.
“We knew that it was going to be a lot of fun announcing it, but I had no idea that I was going to be waking up and it was going to be on all these television broadcasts. But just seeing all the great publicity with it has been extremely, extremely exciting. And it’s been a lot of fun,” Pancake said. “I’m kind of the end of some jokes being my last name being Pancake. I’ve probably heard every joke in the book that deals with pancakes. But there’s going to be a whole new thing with waffles for me but I love it.”
As for that new beautiful black and yellow bag, well, that arrived on Tuesday morning and the driving range was “hectic” with players wanting to get their glimpse of the bag that says “scattered, smothered and covered.”
Pancake said her mother was an ardent Waffle House fan growing up and would have the family frequent Waffle House after church on Sundays growing up in Tennessee. Her order?
“Two eggs over easy, wheat toast, crispy hash browns, probably a side of bacon and usually amongst my family we’d have a couple waffles and everyone would eat half of them,” Pancake said.
These days breakfast is on her after she struck a sponsorship straight out of breakfast food heaven.
“When I first heard about it, I was like this could be awesome but it’s probably really farfetched and then to just see it all work out,” Pancake said. “They have been one of the most unbelievable sponsorships so far, just crazy support.”
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