Over the last 50 years, the performance of the athletic body has changed. What cut it on the field then, doesn’t even compete today. Competitive Athletes know this and they are continually practicing and perfecting their skills to be the best on game-day. Similarly, Gatorade is continually innovating it’s product line to ensure they deliver the best possible fuel to help drive competitive athletes to perform at their best. To showcase this, Gatorade wanted to make clear that all the hard work athletes put into their game, in turn drives Gatorade to innovate further. The competitive athlete’s game is truly Gatorade’s lab. The athletic body is truly what drive’s Gatorade’s innovation and we needed to find the right platform to leverage that concept.

Leveraging a creative pneumonic that lived within Gatorade’s overarching campaign, “point cloud man”, we worked with ESPN to create a “first-ever” custom branded Body Issue cover with AR capabilities via Shazam. The Body Issue cover-reveal garners significant PR attention for the magazine, which gave Gatorade a massive stage to drive conversation.

The custom cover ran within all subscription issues, reaching 2.1 MM sports enthusiasts. The print cover revealed a mystery athlete that was only identified as a “point cloud man”, however when the cover was activated with Shazam, it revealed Dwyane Wade. Once a reader activated within Shazam, they were then able to view exclusive behind-the-scenes footage from his photoshoot. Within the pages of the Body Issue edit, we also had a half Wade, half “point cloud man” spread, tying back to the custom cover and providing further context of Gatorade’s message to those who bought the magazine on shelf.

Based on STARCH survey results, Gatorade's ad in the BODY issue showed lifts in "is an innovative brand" (89% of readers agreed) and "is a leader". It was also #1 favorite brand and #4 most noted. Shazam media delivered 4.7MM impressions across all Shazam platforms, skewed to Gatorade’s male 18-34 demo. The magazine cover execution finished 54x higher than average Shazam benchmark and 4x higher than the previous record holder at Shazam.