As a professional sports beverage, 'Mizone' is Gatorade’s direct competitor. Compared to our competition’s huge media investment, Gatorade’s marketing budget is small in China. Gatorade wanted to communicate its rehydration message to consumers – not just at point-of-sale, but at point-of-thirst.

Within 6 days, we managed to garner 780,000 mentions on Weibo (China’s Twitter), as well as features across nationwide press.

With this challenge in mind, we used the environment as our medium, creating special outdoor ads to communicate to our core customer base generating huge talk value. The sprayers on a football field rehydrate the grass. Gatorade rehydrates the body. We created a field of Gatorade sprinklers. This idea has also been implemented to other playing fields.

With strong affiliation with the major telecommunications companies, China Mobile enables marketers to locate their targets in a specific area via location-based MMS advertising. Consumers would receive a digital coupon via their mobile phone for a free bottle of Gatorade when getting close to the sprayer.