A year ago, Olipop was a rookie in the sports marketing space.
The prebiotic-soda brand’s deal with NWSL team the Kansas City Current went live last April. The Current didn’t have a great season, but the partnership thrived anyway, and at the end of the year, Olipop signed a one-year extension, with the added bonus of pouring rights in the Current’s newly constructed CPKC Stadium.
For a brand going up against traditional soft-drink giants like Coke and Pepsi, which are deeply entrenched in the sports world, the arrangement marked a big win.
“The whole goal of the partnership last year was to test and learn, but we wanted to be grandfathered into the new stadium,” Steven Vigilante, Olipop’s director of growth and talent partnerships, told Marketing Brew. “Now, we are sold in there next to Pepsi, which is super exciting.”
Olipop is building on that momentum and has been active with its dealmaking, adding partnerships from MLS to Nascar to esports, with no intention of slowing down.
Caught in the Current
The Current ended the 2023 season toward the bottom of the league, but so far this year, things are looking up. The team, which is playing in the first-ever venue designed specifically for an NWSL team, is near the top of the league, below only the undefeated Orlando Pride, which recently notched a 17th straight win.
Even before the Current was winning on the field, the partnership was scoring big for Olipop. Last August, when Vigilante and Olipop co-founder and President David Lester were handing out samples before a game, more than half of the hundreds of people Vigilante spoke to told him they’d heard about Olipop because of the Current partnership, he told us.
“The general excitement and enthusiasm, and the amount of thank-you’s we got for supporting their team, was incredible,” he said. “[We] left that being like, ‘Holy smokes. You can feel it. It feels like it’s working.’”
Around the end of the season in November, the Olipop team pulled some data that backed it up: In the six months following the partnership announcement, Olipop saw a 21% incremental increase in sales within Kansas City compared to overall growth in the rest of the country, according to Vigilante. The brand doesn’t do a lot of other marketing in that area, so he largely attributes the boost to the Current.
The result was so positive that the brand double-checked—and then triple-checked.
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“That was mind-blowing,” Vigilante said. “Our data team pulled the data multiple different ways and [over] multiple different time periods just to be like, ‘What’s going on here?’ I would never have expected to see that.”
When it came time to re-up the deal, it was an easy yes, he said, and between the Current’s winning record and CPKC Stadium hosting this year’s NWSL Championship, Vigilante said he “can’t imagine” the sponsorship won’t continue its success.
Ride the wave
Through Olipop’s work with the Current, Vigilante was connected to the MLS team FC Cincinnati right around the time it had an opening for a new beverage partner, Vigilante said. In February, it was made official: Olipop was named the official prebiotic drink of the team’s TQL Stadium as part of a three-year deal, making it the first pro sports venue to sell Olipop right ahead of CPKC Stadium’s home opener.
A few months later, Olipop sped into Nascar, partnering with Legacy Motor Club to bring its branding to the No. 42 Toyota Camry XSE driven by John Hunter Nemechek for eight races in 2024. And in June, Olipop added esports to its sponsorship roster with FlyQuest, a pro esports team that competes in games including League of Legends and Counter-Strike 2.
It’s early days for both deals, but so far, the social signs have been good, he said: FlyQuest’s announcement post on X alone has about 350,000 views.
“If people are going out of their way to comment about how much they love a partnership, that’s a win,” Vigilante said. “You don’t see that all the time.”
The newer partnerships might seem unexpected for a prebiotic-soda brand, but they’re part of an effort to “grow the brand up and reach the next wave” of consumers beyond a health-conscious demographic.
Going forward, Vigilante said he hopes to get Olipop in even more venues, and he’s already having some “pretty major conversations” about sports deals that could kick off next year, he told us. The “Holy Grail,” he said, would be to get Olipop in venues that are hosting hundreds of events a year as opposed to those in the double digits. He’s also trying to get a famous soda drinker to publicly make the switch to Olipop, he said.
But for now, Vigilante says, he is happy with the buzz—or should we say fizz.