• by Amy Corr , Staff Writer, August 15, 2011

On Aug. 6 at the Grove Shopping center in Los Angeles, ACTIVATE drinks brought my favorite SportsCenter ad to life and raised money for a worthy organization.

The SportsCenter ad stars Dan Patrick working after hours at ESPN headquarters. The power suddenly goes out. Patrick heads to the basement to check on the power supply. What he finds is Lance Armstrong taking a break from riding his stationary bike. Armstrong is supplying power to ESPN HQ and didn't realize anyone else was working at that late hour. Watch it here.

ACTIVATE dispensed drinks from a vending machine without accepting monetary currency as payment. Instead, users had to power the vending machine by pedaling an attached stationary bike. A free drink was dispensed for every 30 seconds of pedaling.

In the daylong event, 1,250 bottles of free ACTIVATE were distributed. Through a partnership with Nourish America, ACTIVATE donated the retail value of all the bottles distributed to support nutrition for pregnant women. More than 1,000 people powered the bike and $2,240 was raised for Nourish America.

"We were looking for a fun way to promote an active lifestyle, and give back to a great cause, and this seemed like a perfect vehicle to effectively do that," said Jesse Merrill, Head of Marketing for ACTIVATE.

The company worked with Wong, Doody, Crandall, Wiener to create the vending machine, which took 2 months to produce, from concept to execution.

"We plan to roll this out to several key markets in the West and Southeast in the next few months and will be building out a more robust digital component to make the campaign accessible to the online world," concluded Merrill.