Gatorade is a key part of the moments that matter in sport, and there’s nowhere this is more apparent than America’s biggest football game, the Super Bowl. But Gatorade’s biggest presence during football’s biggest game has become a pop culture phenomenon: the Gatorade Dunk. It started organically 30-plus years ago when two players hoisted a Gatorade cooler full of the sports drink over their coach’s head to celebrate their win. And now it’s become the iconic symbol of victory.

Although it is seen by millions of broadcast viewers, it’s only been experienced by a select few individuals since its inception. Gatorade has never commercialized the Dunk, fearing that if it did, the magic and authenticity around its role in sports would be lost.

Despite that, Gatorade wanted to have an authentic voice during Super Bowl 50. And rather than shouting the loudest in the advertising competition, we aimed to be heard by having fans carry the conversation for us.

So we created a mobile augmented reality experience that leveraged the popular “lens” functionality of the social platform Snapchat to let fans create user-generated videos of themselves getting virtually Dunked. Our approach was to leverage the lens, one of the platform’s newest and most popular offerings at the time, in an organic way that didn’t feel like an advertisement, but a natural extension of Snapchat.

Using facial recognition technology, the Dunk lens put eye black on the user’s face and a large orange “G” cooler behind them, ready to Dunk them. When a user opened their mouth, it triggered the lens. And just like the players on the sideline, it hoisted the Gatorade cooler and dowsed the user with a virtual shower of Orange Gatorade, giving them an animated Dunk selfie to share.

All things considered, the strategy and idea brought together the perfect harmony of timing with the novelty of the lens functionality, the big stage of the Super Bowl and the rising usage of the platform.

By the time the actual Gatorade Dunk happened after the game, our augmented Dunk was seen by more people than the Super Bowl itself. At the same time, it marked the most-used lens in Snapchat’s history. We shattered our own expectations:

• With more than 8 million user-generated videos, 15.6 million unique swipes and 165 million views, it was the biggest ad of the Super Bowl … and it never even appeared on TV.

• The average interaction with the lens was 29.91 seconds, nearly the length of a multimillion-dollar :30 TV spot.

• It lifted Gatorade’s perception with the people who matter most. With our audience of competitive athletes, we saw a 4.3% lift in brand favorability.

• 33,000 mentions of Gatorade on Super Bowl Sunday, which is four times Gatorade’s daily average mentions.

• Gatorade saw a 30.2% lift in ad awareness.

Gatorade saw an 8.3% lift in purchase intent.