Gatorade Makes a Slam Dunk with its #BeLikeMike Campaign

Gatorade’s Be Like Mike campaign is one of the most iconic in the history of sports advertising. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Gatorade team wanted to revive the campaign 23 years after it first ran—a nod to Michael Jordan’s number.

When deciding the most impactful way to introduce it to today’s generation, Gatorade turned to Instagram. “Instagram was the perfect solution because the campaign is highly visual,” says Jeff Miller, Director of Digital Strategy at Gatorade.

Collaborating with media agency OMD, creative agency VML and partners at Facebook, Gatorade created a campaign approach that combined the power of creative with a sharp media strategy. Using photo ads of Michael Jordan along with the hashtag #BeLikeMike to keep consumers actively engaged, Gatorade ran the campaign on Instagram first, and then scaled it on Facebook. “We could take all of the learnings we saw on Instagram and pull them into a larger, scaled audience on Facebook,” Susanna Earnest, Managing Director at OMD tells us. “We reached 4.5M consumers on Instagram, but it was the retargeting we did on Facebook that allowed us to quadruple that.”

After the campaign ended, Gatorade saw the highest brand recall of any of its Be Like Mike campaigns to date—getting a 20-point lift in ad recall and a 5-point lift in the KPI that Gatorade inspires me. “Facebook and Instagram working in tandem gave us the ability to leverage really surgical targeting and clear measurement with impactful ad units rooted in a visual medium,” says Jeff. “Through Instagram, the campaign delivered a 20-point lift in ad recall and a 5-point lift in the KPI that Gatorade is a brand that inspires me.”

Watch how Gatorade used Instagram to bring back its iconic #BeLikeMike campaign after 23 years.