Research showed people believed cricketers weren’t elite athletes, and didn’t require Gatorade’s hydration to perform at their peak.

To change the false perception, we created The Bolt Rate, a brand new televised statistic, that harnessed Catapult GPS technology to measure player run speed between the wickets. Unlike traditional cricket stats, the Bolt Rate focused purely on explosive performance – highlighting the elite athleticism of cricketers, and thus, their need for hydration.

To launch the Bolt Rate, we brought the planet’s fastest athlete and die-hard cricket fan, Usain Bolt, out of retirement to train the Australian Cricket team to improve their run speed ahead of their upcoming Ashes series against England – a move we knew would ignite conversation.

When the series started, the Bolt Rate became integrated into live broadcast, letting fans and commentators track and compare run speed data of their favourite players live at The Ashes and beyond.

To launch our never-before-seen metric, we recruited the planet’s fastest athlete and die-hard cricket fan, Usain Bolt, as the new speed coach for the Australian cricket team, training them to improve their Bolt Rate ahead of the upcoming Ashes series.

Content of Usain’s secret training session with the Australian team was leaked on Facebook and Instagram, going viral overnight.

When the Ashes started the following week, the Bolt Rate became integrated into live broadcast, with commentators, media and fans discussing player run speed throughout the series.

A live leaderboard hosted on Cricket Australia’s website and Gatorade’s social channels was constantly updated with the fastest run speed data, letting the world track their favourite player’s performance in real time.

Finally, we created a Gatorade branded ‘Fastest Man of the Match Award’ to be presented to The Ashes’ fastest player, helping fuel competition between players and discussion between fans on social media.

By signing the world’s fastest speed coach and broadcasting a game-changing stat during live matches, we demonstrated the importance of Gatorade for achieving peak athletic performance, helping insert them firmly into the sport’s culture, making Gatorade more relevant to the game of cricket than ever before.

The stats on our stat say it all:

- Over 500 pieces of editorial globally including mainstream media such as Fairfax, News Corp, Channel 9 News, Today Show and the front page of The Sun’s sport section.

- Global reach of over 200 million

- 75% brand engagement compared to 20% competitor average

- 63% athletic credibility compared to 27% competitor average

- 69% brand recall compared to 19% competitor average

- The Bolt Rate launch film attracted over 2.5million views and over 15,000 post reactions.

While our campaign spoke to all fans of cricket, our specific target audience were socially competitive male athletes aged 25 to 35.

Rather than create another ad to reach this demographic, we created the Bolt Rate, a stat that integrated Gatorade into live broadcasts of the summer’s biggest sporting event.

To get the world talking about our new speed stat, we recruited the the planet’s fastest athlete and die-hard cricket fan, Usain Bolt, as the official speed coach for the Autralian cricket team, and created an online film that went viral, without paid push.

Off the back of the hype created, the Bolt Rate was soon adopted by cricket’s top commentators and sports media, who discussed the new stat in live broadcast and various social platforms.

This seamlessly integrated Gatorade into the stat obsessed culture of cricket, helping them outshine the game’s biggest sponsors at a fraction of the budget.

Gatorade has sponsored the Australian Cricket Team for over a decade, but in recent years, it’s faced a couple of challenges.

Firstly, it’s struggled to get the cut through against major spending sponsors like KFC, Qantas and Commonwealth Bank.

Secondly, Gatorade’s purpose – to fuel elite athletes to perform at their best - wasn’t synonymous with cricket. This was due to the perception that cricketers aren’t elite athletes compared to AFL players and other high endurance athletes, and therefore don’t require functional hydration to perform at their best.

Our brief was to integrate Gatorade into the action of cricket to improve its sport performance credentials amongst players and fans.

We had two key objectives: to highlight the elite athleticism within cricket in order to drive Gatorade’s relevance, and to prove that Gatorade is the best fuel for improving performance within the game, such as speed and endurance.