As a brand, Lucozade had fallen off the radar of its youth audience. We needed to drive brand re-appraisal and mass awareness for the total brand and particularly for its low calories sports drink, Lucozade Sport Lite. Lucozade Sport Lite was seen as a diet drink and by implication ‘for females only’, but we decided not to focus on the calorie content, and instead to celebrate the feeling of being active and to just sell energy but to create it.The insight: Treat energy as an opportunity and create energy though all of our activity. Make light, playful energy jump out of the screen and create a visceral experience for our audience. Create opportunities for people to be energetic. And use our drink.

We wanted each step of the campaign to create the opportunity for engagement to take the brand beyond traditional, paid for media and into earned media where we could win fans, not just recruit customers. This meant not starting one, big fire, but lots of little ones.We built equity into each campaign to exploit and distribute across people’s lives. From using high profile talent like DJ Fresh and his track ‘Louder’ (composed just for Lite) to collaborating with music video directors Ben Newman and Jake Nava, to infiltrating fan bases and communities of our featured artists and sports/ activities. We also coordinated the release of the ads with the release of the sound track, creating amplification through channels like iTunes, radio stations and MTV.

It’s early days, but from the responses so far it’s clear Lucozade is making its way noisily back into the lives of our drinkers. By dropping our devotion to persuasive messages, and instead acting more like an entertainment brand, we’ve made an FMCG brand something people want to talk about and spend time with. This is demonstrated by a UK number 1 single with 472, 876 copies sold to date, Lucozade Sport Lite sales increasing by £7 million, an 104% increase from last year and a total 63,008,692 opportunities to see.