• by Christine Champagne , April 21, 2008

Gatorade's campaign comes through

Every game needs a hero. That's the central theme of Gatorade's "League of Clutch" campaign. Created by Chicago's Element 79 Partners, the effort portrays the brand's roster of all-star athletes - tennis star Maria Sharapova, soccer players Landon Donovan and Abby Wambach, baseball slugger Derek Jeter, basketball star Dwyane Wade and football's Peyton Manning among others - as heroes capable of coming through and making clutch plays when it matters most.

Actually, these athletes aren't merely depicted as heroes - they're portrayed as larger-than-life superheroes in a series of epic television spots, print ads running in magazines such as Sports Illustrated and ESPN magazine, and on leagueofclutch.com, the centerpiece of the campaign. "There is definitely a Super Friends vibe," acknowledges Element 79 Partners copywriter Ron D'Innocenzo, who came up with the concept of banding the athletes together into the all-powerful League of Clutch.

The League of Clutch television spots in particular are unabashedly glorious in their celebration of the athletes' greatness. Shot in black and white and set to Carmina Burana's majestic "O Fortuna," each commercial, including those featuring Giants quarterback and Super Bowl XLII MVP, Eli Manning, and NASCAR Nextel Cup champ Jimmie Johnson, freezes the action at pivotal moments, and the athletes are literally pulled out of the frame, creating a 3-D effect.

The spots certainly stand out on television because of their look and feel. "Obviously, we were working with existing images of the athletes, and we didn't want the commercials to look like a highlight reel you'd see on ESPN," says Element 79 Partners creative director Doug Behm. "So we developed this photogrammetry technique, which has actually been around for something like 100 years, with Method Studios, and we were able to create something unique and ownable."

Incidentally, it should be noted that the creative team at Element 79 Partners made a clutch play of their own when they scrambled in the days after Super Bowl XLII and quickly produced the aforementioned Eli Manning spot, which heralded how his clutch plays helped the underdog Giants win the Super Bowl. "Because of how we created the campaign, it allowed us the flexibility to do something very fast like that, so we seized the opportunity," Behm remarks.

One would have to assume that the athletes enjoy seeing their greatest achievements being presented in such an impressive fashion. Of course, that isn't the goal of the League of Clutch campaign. Rather, Gatorade - far and away the top-advertised brand in the sports nutritionals category, according to research firm Packaged Facts, which reports that the company spent $170 million on advertising in 2006 - is trying to sell its sports drink, and the target consumers are male and female athletes, ages 15 to 24.

Undoubtedly, many of the young people in this demographic are fans of the athletes belonging to the League of Clutch, but one has to ask if there is a risk in creating such an image-oriented campaign as opposed to one that more overtly promotes the beverage itself. "The risk is always that you're not showing enough of the product," says cnbc sports reporter Darren Rovell, also the author of the book First in Thirst: How Gatorade Turned the Science of Sweat into a Cultural Phenomenon. "But that risk is afforded to top brands, and Gatorade has become the Xerox of sports drinks. So they have the ability to do that, whereas you might argue that Powerade or an upstart doesn't."

While we don't see the athletes chugging the sports drink in the advertising, we do see beads of Gatorade-colored sweat, a well-known image in Gatorade marketing, trickling down their faces, leading us to believe that they have imbibed the beverage, and it has helped propel them to victory.

Another reason why Gatorade might choose to focus on its association with big-name athletes, as opposed to the product itself, is because of what's in Gatorade. "Gatorade is a hydrator, but it is sugar and salt and water," Rovell says. "So Gatorade marketing is a lot like Nike at its core in building the ideal. It's like they are saying, 'This is why you should drink this,' as opposed to saying, 'This is what it is.' "

Obviously, Gatorade's marketing has been incredibly successful. Gatorade originated the sports drink category when it was
created in the 1960s, and it is widely reported to own more than an 80 percent share of the $4 billion sports drink market.

As previously noted, the microsite leagueofclutch.com is the ultimate destination for this campaign: All of the other elements, both offline and online (banner ads and paid search), direct consumers to that url, where visitors get a unique, controllable 360-degree view of Gatorade's all-star athletes in action and hear them talking about how they power through when the pressure is on.

Element 79 Partners, which has an in-house interactive shop, produced leagueofclutch.com specifically to reach the teen end of Gatorade's target demographic. "We really thought it was critical to give this audience something unique online rather than just repurpose a bunch of content," D'Innocenzo says, "and what we're finding is that the interaction rates online are really strong. People are spending
several minutes on the site."

According to Packaged Facts' latest report on sports nutritionals, brands in this arena must address the evolving media
consumption of their younger audience and go beyond traditional media for outreach.

In order to generate interest in the site, Element 79 Partners senior vice president of digital, Kurt Karlenzig, stresses that it was crucial not just to toss some video from the commercials online, but instead to create a unique experience: "We really wanted to create a space where they can see these athletes in a way that they may not see them in other places. We could have shown them in video clips, but we really wanted to isolate them and show them from this 360-degree view and then hear them say what inspires and what drives them."

The leagueofclutch.com microsite links to a MySpace page, a forum Karlenzig maintains is still relevant to teens despite the popularity of rival Facebook, on which visitors can post photos and videos of their clutch plays. A recent visit to Gatorade's MySpace page, which had over 9,000 friends at the time, revealed footage of a girl making a record-breaking pole vault at the Texas 5A State Championships, a boy scoring a goal in the last six seconds of a hockey game and a young quarterback scrambling to make the touchdown that gave his team a district championship. (Meanwhile, three young men who excel at the sport of beer pong have posted a goofy parody of the League of Clutch commercials on YouTube.)

Explaining the decision to give amateur athletes a MySpace page to show their stuff, Karlenzig says, "We wanted to be inclusive rather than putting these superheroes on a platform by themselves. Everybody who is a competitor aspires toward the same thing, and they all have their moments."

Rovell thinks the MySpace page was a good idea. "The next age in sports marketing is participatory sports marketing," Rovell says, "so it's a smart move to let consumers show - on a branded site - how good they are or what they did."

That said, Rovell believes Gatorade could take this foray into participatory marketing to the next level by forming an alliance with another sports-related enterprise to create a more advanced and more interactive Web site. Rovell cites sparqtraining.com, a training tool created out of an alliance between Nike and SPARQ, as a model to follow.

Moving into and dominating new areas of marketing will be crucial for Gatorade in the future. "The definition of who they're competing against is changing," Rovell says, noting that "it would be a false premise to believe that they are just competing in the sports drink category. Now, they're competing with energy drinks, water and enhanced water, and they have to rationalize why they are relevant more than ever before."