Branded entertainment is exploding in the U.S. as marketers endeavor to mitigate advertising avoidance by reaching consumers through shared passions and values. The most popular approaches are product integration into TV shows or movies, licensing deals with musicians and curated content or experiences. The transactions are simple: A brand pays to be associated with an entertainment property and leverages it to appeal to its audience.

But there’s a stark difference between co-opting culture and creating it. We flipped the model from brand as sponsor to brand as programmer in order to engage high school athletes in a brand story they could really relate to.

“Huddle Up” launched as a 5-part series on Under Armour’s website. To tease the series, we had Cam tweet out to fans. We then exclusively released trailers for each episode with a different media partner each week on the Bleacher Report, Fast Company, ESPN E:60, MediaPost and ClickZ. These trailers generated additional press coverage each week.

We had brand partners and Under Armour athletes socially promote the series. This list included Gatorade, EA Sports, Carolina Panthers, Interscope Records, Rivals.com, Jordan Speith and Deion Sanders. Finally, targeted media buys on YouTube, Complex.com, NFL.com, ESPN SportsCenter and CBS Sports drove additional views.

Our goal was to sustain awareness and engagement for the brand during the 6-weeks of its key football selling season.

Achievements include:

•The “Huddle Up” series earned over 1.5 million views—equating to almost 9 years in time spent with Under Armour content.

•Interest in the branded content drove a click-thru-rate (CTR) to UnderArmour.com that outperformed other key brand initiatives

•Branded content drove a click-thru-rate (CTR) and was 3-times higher than the industry average CTR

The series also sparked a conversation around the brand that permeated young fans Facebook pages as well as with influential sports commentators and bloggers.

•Measured social engagement peaked at over 328,000 cumulative likes, comments, shares and retweets.