Michael Jordan dunking for Gatorade. Cristiano Ronaldo dribbling through a crowded airport for Nike. Shaq blocking shots from dozens of clones of himself for Reebok. Some of the greatest sports ads of all time feature elite athletes achieving physical feats unimaginable to the average person.
Now, some sports brands have begun focusing on another feat that might be hard to imagine for athletes and nonathletes alike: prioritizing mental health.
While the messaging differs from brand to brand, some sports marketers are betting the strategy of highlighting mental health instead of just athletic performance will continue to work in 2025.
“There are a lot of factors that are putting enormous amounts of pressure on not just professional athletes, but everyday athletes,” said Matrona Filippou, president of the global hydration, sports, coffee, and tea category at Coca-Cola, whose brand Powerade has embraced mental fitness messaging in recent years. “I think that irrespective of who you are, I think you are going to want to be able to step back and take a pause.”
Different brainwaves
Since 2022, Powerade has released campaigns under a platform called “Pause is Power,” which was inspired by Simone Biles’s decision to take a step back from competing during the Tokyo Olympics. As the name implies, “Pause is Power” encourages athletes to follow in Biles’s footsteps and put their training on hold if they feel the need to better address their mental health.
As part of a recent initiative called The Athletes Code, the brand has also offered athlete partners the option to pause their contractual obligations with the brand without losing their sponsorships.
“We spent time listening to our consumers, where they actually said that winning is important, but it’s not everything,” Filippou said. “We felt that if we really wanted to be true to the brand, true to the consumers who follow the brand and consume our products, then we should also take a first step and actually say, ‘How do we support the athletes in a very different way?’”
Not every brand is leaning into that messaging, and are in recent campaigns emphasizing the intense physical requirements of elite athleticism. For its Olympic campaign last summer, Nike led with the tagline “Winning Isn’t for Everyone” in an ad that won USA Today’s Olympics Ad Meter but received some blowback for its tone. The brand embraced similar messaging during its campaign for fall marathon season, proclaiming that “Winning Isn’t Comfortable.”
Other brands are looking to position themselves somewhere in the middle. The clothing brand Rhone, which co-founder and creative director Ben Checketts said has addressed mental health since its founding in 2014, has aimed to show that mental and physical fitness go hand in hand, including in a campaign from late last year, which put a more positive twist on the phrase “get your head in the game.”
“We don’t necessarily message like, ‘Hey, if you’re an elite athlete, cut back on what you’re doing for your training,’” Checketts said. “It’s not necessarily a message of do less; it’s do less, but better, and do it with the eye toward, ‘How is this contributing to my mental health?’”
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Adidas has taken a similar approach, but applies it specifically to youth and college-aged athletes, SVP of Brand Marketing Chris Murphy said. The brand’s 2024 “You Got This” campaign, which is about relieving some of the pressures in sports, was inspired by focus groups of young athletes who repeatedly brought up mental health, he said.
Adidas has also collaborated with brands like Calm and The Hidden Opponent, a nonprofit focused on athlete mental health.
“We thought, ‘Hey, if we’re going to put effort and energy and media dollars into this message…we should probably also be investing underneath that into programs or partners that are also helping these same kids work through some of the pressures that come in sport,’” Murphy said.
Consumer mindset
Despite an increasing number of brands and pro athletes speaking out about mental health and a general decrease in the stigma around the topic, there’s no guarantee consumers will be receptive to sports brands that branch out from physical fitness. Murphy acknowledged there’s always a risk that a message won’t resonate, but he said that the past year has indicated that’s not the case.
“You Got This” was designed to increase brand awareness, improve perception, and associate Adidas with positivity in sports, and “after just the first year of running those ads in a significant way, we’re seeing all those metrics go up,” Murphy said.
Powerade’s “The Vault” Olympic campaign with Biles organically reached more than double the accounts that follow Powerade (about 281,000 compared to 134,000), with nearly 100% positive sentiment and engagement up about 6% compared to the brand’s average, according to Filippou. The campaign also generated millions of earned media impressions and more than 1,000 hours of watch time on Instagram and YouTube, she added.
Generally speaking, Checketts said the response to Rhone’s mental health efforts has been positive; Miami Heat power forward Kevin Love, a mental health advocate who was featured in Rhone’s latest campaign, said he was a fan of the work, Checketts said.
“There was a little bit of just apprehension of a clothing brand speaking to people in this way, but I think everybody understands that in order to exist as a brand now, you have to be more than just the product you’re offering,” he said.
For Adidas, Powerade, and Rhone, mental health initiatives are here to stay at least through 2025, and likely for much longer, execs said. Adidas is continuing its work with The Hidden Opponent by releasing even more products together in the coming year, Murphy said, and Powerade is planning to build on its “Pause is Power” platform to keep it relevant, according to Filippou.
That’s not to say sports brands’ approach to mental fitness won’t ever evolve. The Rhone team is still working to find the right balance of encouraging hard work while embracing the occasional benefits of a breather, Checketts said, and Filippou acknowledged the possibility that Powerade might pivot its approach if the consumer mindset about mental health changes.
For what it’s worth, she said she hopes it doesn’t.
“I don’t believe we’re going to go back to, ‘It’s all about winning,’” she said.