During the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles — considered the greatest gymnast of all time — shocked the world when she withdrew from competition. Simone was held up as a symbol of gymnastic perfection, and the pressure she felt — from the world and herself — was too heavy a burden. She needed to take a pause and get her head right.

But instead of support, she was condemned as weak, unpatriotic, and damaging to her team.

Yet, this moment of vulnerability revealed a deeper strength: the courage to prioritize mental health over medals, setting a powerful example for athletes and spectators alike. And the wait was worthwhile. Because when Simone returned to competition in 2023, she came back stronger than ever.

Powerade stood by her side when few others did, recognizing that Pause Is Power. Simply put, together with Simone, we wanted to prove that the haters were wrong.

In this film, we watch Simone Biles perform a vault, the very same apparatus that caused her to have "the twisties" during the Tokyo Olympics 2020 and subsequently withdraw from the competition.

While she twists in the air, we see her trajectory from Tokyo 2020 to Paris 2024. In each scene showing Simone's personal life, the camera movement mimics Simone's movement in the air. The voice-over is Simone herself, talking openly about her struggles and her return as an improved athlete and human being.

The film speaks directly to Powerade's global platform: Pause is Power.

It shows how Simone took a break to regain her power and come back stronger than ever, establishing new personal and world records and qualifying for Paris 2020. It sets Powerade aside from the win-at-all-costs mentality messages from other sports brands, spreading a positive message to future athletes.

Powerade launched “The Vault” on platforms where audiences could interact within the comments and share the campaign on their own channels.

With the goal of advancing authentic mental health conversations around sports, the best way to expand our reach was through allowing and encouraging people to share our message on their own channels.

Taking this social-first approach to the launch allowed the conversation to scale naturally as people shared their own pause and comeback stories across their social platforms. The response in our comment sections reinforced this social-first strategy by creating a forum for safe conversations around mental health, with many users thanking Powerade and Simone for bringing light to such an important issue.

Working with an athlete like Simone, we looked for partners Kim Gehrig & Somesuch to bring the perfect combination of top-tier work, sensitivity and care. We fixated on intricate elements within a short runway to produce a highly technical, multiple camera shoot in Simone’s home gym in Houston.

We worked with Simone’s team to find time best considering her training routine. We pulled together a highly comprehensive plan inclusive of body doubles, stunt doubles, stand-ins and rig setups to work within the space limitations on the actual shoot day.

We launched this campaign across Powerade’s owned social and PR channels directly following Team Coca-Cola’s Olympic athlete announcement. The Vault premiered across global channels, with local markets following with cutdowns native to their social platforms.

We quickly reached scale through the work as well as the overall message, launching completely organically to resonate with audiences in the most authentic way.

Within first week of launch and one Instagram post:

-Organically reached >266,000 people (over 2x account following).

-Increased average engagement by >3325%.

-100% positive sentiment.

-Watch time of over 1,000 hours across Instagram and Youtube posts.

-125M+ earned impressions across traditional / social channels.

-15% brand value growth — to $4.3B.

-4% increase in high frequency purchasers — to 14.3M.

Powerade’s comment sections have been flooded with people praising the brand for its “incredible work,” saying that it is going “so viral everywhere” and “a POWERful commercial”. There has also been tremendous amplification from notable voices including Simone’s training gym, her husband Jonathan Owens, USA Gymnastics, and top activism pages including Black Mental Wellness and Because of Them. With the goal of advancing mental health dialogue in sports, this campaign has 10-times exceeded previous brand initiatives and continues to be a safe space for important conversations about mental health.