In September sports drink Gatorade signed up a team of nine student athlete creators for its latest ‘Social Squad’ stars for a new sports content series on Tik Tok.
The US energy drink brand expanded its presence on the short video social platform by teaming up with athlete creators who produce sports-related content on its own TikTok feed. The athletes play a variety of sports – spanning football, soccer and basketball – all share their own videos of themselves and their friends/teamates in action, as well as talking about sports and urging other Tik Tok users to make videos of themselves participating in challenges such as trick shots, while the brand is also cross-promoting the athlete-created content.
@gatorade Tryouts are over—Let’s meet the squad #sports #soccer #football #basketball #GatoradeSocialSquad
The brand first held tryouts on TikTok, harnessing the app’s power to crowdsource student athletes, before selected a team which includes Briana Green (who plays with the Harlem Globetrotters exhibition basketball team) and Caitlyn Schrepfer (a soccer freestyler whose videos highlight her juggling skills).
The Social Squad’s content series runs from September through November as the US fall/autumn sports season heats up again among colleges and high schools after more than a year of pandemic-driven disruptions.
“It made sense to introduce a program where we could meet our athletes in a space where they are consuming much of their off-field content – TikTok,” said Gatorade Head Of Brand Strategy Carolyn Braff. “We’re always looking for new digital platforms that pique the interest of our athletes and layer into our brand strategies and this was a perfect synergy. Gatorade is building a community of creators who authentically love the brand and love sport, and who have become our creative ambassadors. The members of the squad are supporting one another, doing things like commenting on each other’s posts, and really operating like a team you’d see on the field.”
“With the Gatorade Social Squad, which was launched entirely on TikTok, athletes are communicating directly with their peers,” added Braff. “We’re approaching utility and the one-to-one relationship between athletes and communities in different ways.”
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The initiative sees the PepsiCo sports drink brand lean into a mainstream mobile channel as it seeks to organically reach younger users whose primary video channel is mobile streaming.
Other recent TikTok activations and campaigns from PepsiCo include Gatorade’s ‘Skills & Drills’ mobile video series for student athletes and its June initiative on Hudl (a video platform for coaches and athletes to record and share highlight reels) on which it integrated its messaging with original content to organically reach and resonate with overlapping audiences.
The TikTok app, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and became the first non-Facebook mobile app to reach 3 billion downloads worldwide, shows a continuous sequence of videos posted by users and personalizes user feeds based on viewing behaviours and preferences.
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