Gatorade Mission Control
With the marketing landscape changing and Gatorade refining its target audience, we needed to find a smart, insightful way to connect with our new 13-17-year-old competitive athlete audience. So we put insight at the core of our solution and created Mission Control to listen, learn and engage online. Mission Control operates 24/7 and is staffed by a cross-agency team with expertise in digital and social media.
Mission Control used 20 tools to create over 191 actionable reports spanning nine business disciplines at Gatorade. Understanding that insights are not just for marketing, Mission Control has added value to the brand, sales, consumer response, sports marketing and Gatorade Sports Science Institute teams. We translated product conversation into business goals and integrated that data across the product portfolio to understand brand health. We bridged the gap between the traditional insights team by mapping social conversation back to the Gatorade brand pillars, giving a real-time view of how our messages were being received. Last year, Mission Control listened to over 75 million conversations and analyzed over 1 million teen athlete mentions.
This helped to identify new audiences within the competitive teen athlete space and optimize for the current audience, which created a 61% increase in organic engagement on Twitter and a 125% increase in Instagram engagements. We also discovered a true Win From Within athlete in Ben Jackson through social listening and told his story to inspire millions more. This shifted #WinFromWithin mentions from 27% relevancy to 96% relevancy over the course of the campaign.
Determined to understand Gatorade’s core audience, we manually identified 1,500 competitive teen athletes and put them into a social whitelist so we could hone in on their interests and daily conversations. This whitelist informed two record-breaking campaigns for Gatorade that spurred a significant increase in sales, including Gatorade’s C-Store YouTube series, which became Gatorade’s most watched series with more than 23 million views. It was recognized on MTV2 and Comedy Central as well as on Ad Age’s viral video chart for five weeks of the seven-week campaign.
Mission Control has transformed not only how Gatorade collects and measures data, but also how they act on it. The command center leverages real-time consumer conversation, online activity and attitudinal studies to drive business decisions across local, national and global business units. We shifted to an integrated approach with the consumer at the forefront. We’ve stopped disrupting interests by becoming what consumers are interested in through the use of Mission Control’s social listening and creative application of data.
