Gatorade is the global leader in sports drinks and, historically, has dramatized the importance of high-quality hydration by celebrating top performing athletes. World Cup 2022 was coming up and the brand had the Brazilian National Soccer Team sponsorship (CBF) but couldn’t afford to sponsor any of the individual players on the team, making it harder to tell a personal, emotionally engaging story. To make things tougher, a key competitor, Powerade, was a FIFA sponsor in Qatar. The key challenge was how to stand out with a relatively small budget, during an event where many brands in Brazil invest millions of dollars. As reference, a World-Cup media sponsorship alone can cost as much as U$ 30M /U$ 35M. With a budget a fraction of that size, we needed to find an idea which would connect to pop culture, stand-out and earn media coverage for our client by engaging with the audience.

Rafinha, a Brazilian player passed his prime, was nicknamed the "Gatorade Delivery Boy" by fans, after he spent some time without playing, just warming the bench and bringing Gatorade to his teammates. That was a social media phenomenon a few years ago, and it reverberates until now. We linked that meme to Brazil's official hydrators to make our story more interesting and memorable. Rafinha was a good sport about this and made fun of himself when he joined a new team, by bringing a large Gatorade cooler to practice. We decided to bring Rafinha on as the new apprentice hydrator, and to learn from the best. In the campaign, we see Rafinha training with Serginho, who has been hydrating the Brazilian team for over eight years. Bringing to life an internet meme helped to make the role of hydrators relevant and memorable for our football fan audience.

When a key competitor sponsors football’s greatest event it takes a lot of sweat to beat their exposure in TV broadcasts. Since Powerade had the spotlight, Gatorade had to innovate to steal the show. Rafinha’s meme fit perfectly, allowing us to capitalize on an idea native to social media, and born from pop culture. It also allowed us to tell the story and build relevance for invisible heroes, the hydrators, who have always supported the pro players behind the scenes. Without them, even the top stars would not perform the same. By celebrating them, we told an interesting story, dramatized the brand benefits, and avoided the need for expensive contracts with top football stars. Inspirational data was based on social monitoring of hot topics amongst the audience, defined as men and women between the ages of 16 and 45, with an interest in sports and physical activity.

To share various aspects of Rafinha's story with the hydrators, we planned a two-day shoot to produce nine videos (from 15" to 50"), as well as many stills. One film established the importance of hydrators and announced Rafinha as the new apprentice. Three others showed Rafinha training sprint, resistance, and a funny, technical hydration class with Serginho. Four short films showed Rafinha commenting on the performance of the hydrators (not the players) during the sporting event, and a farewell video explained what Rafinha learned and showed his appreciation towards the hydrators.

The campaign was kicked off with the first ever press conference held by hydrators, for influencers and journalists. Rafinha showed up to ask questions and express his interest in the role.

The campaign ran between November and December 2022, exclusively on digital media such as Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Teads, UOL, Waze, Yahoo, Amazon, Seedtag and Bing.

Building off a pre-existing social media phenomenon, our campaign went viral, getting picked up, organically, by over 15 influencers and content creators, who celebrated the brilliance and humor of the campaign in 230+ posts, with 735k views and a potential reach of over 5M people.

Overall, we had 62M organic views and earned the media equivalent of three times the brand's paid budget. The online campaign health was 85% (positive + neutral comments) and visualization retention was 57%, compared to the 37% benchmark. PR coverage included 57 stories in digital, print and TV channels, and 90M pageviews.

Sales were 18.7% above the previous year and 5.1% above the business objectives.