It’s not a modern discovery that music and sports are often directly intertwined. Athletes have their own pump up songs for workouts and games, and the celebrity culture of professional athletes and world-renowned music artists continues to integrate. Gatorade wanted to take that general acceptance and linkage of music and sports performance to the next level, but it needed to be inherent to the brands belief and provide true utility to the competitive athlete. Gatorade needed to find it’s unique angle into music and we needed to find a creative way to weave sport, science, performance, and music all together to be in service of the athlete. Through the Amplify program, Gatorade sought to test a multitude of songs to see what drove workout performance, create a database, and tailor customized playlists based on workout type, duration and music preference. This database then fueled the program known as Gatorade Amplify.

By conducting a rigorous data analysis representing thousands of songs and millions of users, Gatorade and Spotify identified multiple sonic attributes or clusters of attributes within workout-related songs as the key to unlocking the most optimal workout playlists. Users could choose between three different workout experiences, seven different musical genres and multiple different workout durations in order to attain the best training and musical experience possible.

To add further dimension to the story, we worked with Complex to create a behind the scenes video that highlighted executive producer, Steve Aoki, Gatorade athlete, D’Angelo Russell, and how data was layered as the foundation of the program. The entire program was amplified through Spotify, Complex and social to solidify Gatorade’s position as an innovative brand in sports fuel.

To date, Gatorade Amplify has generated over 61K playlists (5x higher than Spotify’s benchmarks) equating to 23K hours of listening time, with an average time spent of 17 minutes (per day/per user), exceeding Spotify's benchmarks by more than 2X.

Added value brand lift study, commissioned through Complex, recorded a +33pt lift in "Gatorade is a sports performance innovator" and +12pt lift in "Gatorade is a leader" amongst the Complex audience.

Gatorade’s own brand lift study, amongst our core teen target who were exposed to the program, showed significant lifts. There was a 12pp lift in “Is a leader” (from 62% to 74%) and an 11pp lift against “Is an innovative brand (from 54% to 65%).