Optimum Nutrition Flips Sports Sponsorship Conventions

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Think of athlete press conferences and ask yourself – what’s the one element they all share? Sponsorship – rows of logos on walls behind a sportsperson, on their clothing and even on the microphones they use. It’s such a prevalent part of the visuals of sport that if it vanished, you’d really notice something was missing. 

That’s exactly the scenario Optimum Nutrition, the world’s no. 1 sports nutrition brand and agency TBWA Ireland create in their latest campaign, starring McLaren F1 Champion Lando Norris. The campaign builds on the concept that the brand is one of the advantages that competitive athletes don’t want their rivals to know about.

“Unlike traditional endorsement campaigns where famous athletes publicly promote a product, “The Optimum Advantage” turns the model upside down. Optimum Nutrition is trusted by the world’s best sportspeople and our athletes will do anything to keep it hidden from their competitors” said Colin Westcott-Pitt, Chief Brand Officer at Glanbia Performance Nutrition. 

So instead of presenting sports nutrition as a typical endorsement, the ad frames the product as something exclusive that should be protected. This works because scarcity and a sense of secrecy often boost how valuable something feels. 

Optimum Nutrition is investing heavily in digital and social activations for the campaign, as that’s where its young target audience is. So for Test Your Ad Pro, we focused on a sample drawn directly from the target market of sports nutrition category users (while also, as always, collecting a representative sample for benchmarking purposes). And we used our Test Your Ad Social Video tool, which gives all our main predictive metrics while also capturing critical information on attention levels over the course of the ad. 

The results show Optimum Nutrition has scored at the top of the database, getting a maximum 5.9-Star Rating among the audience it’s aiming for. These social media users also come away from the ad with good short-term Spike and Brand Fluency scores – they recognise the brand and are ready to buy.  

These target viewers pick up on nutrition, health and performance as the ad’s Key Associations, all scoring highly positive emotional reactions. The overwhelmingly positive response indexes strongly on amusement and schadenfreude, highly effective types of happiness that show the clever, witty approach speaks to ON’s target market. And in the comments, there’s surprise at the association with Lando Norris and happiness from the entertaining storyline. 

Sports nutrition is not a high-scoring category in general so the 5.9-Star Rating for the target market is a terrific result. The ad also scores a 3.8 star rating with a general social audience, way about the 2.3-Star Social Video average. While they’re not the targets, the ad lands well with them too and may drive additional recognition and wider sales. 

The other area where the ad excels is attention – that vital metric for Social Video, as it shows potential performance in a low-attention environment where the next video is always a skip away. Here the ad still captures 95% of viewers’ attention 10 seconds in – the average is 84%. 

The reason the ad does well with attention is down to storytelling – it introduces a familiar face in Lando and then intrigues viewers with what he’s up to (watch the ad to find out!). It’s a decision that means Optimum Nutrition can run a longer ad than many social video spots – the strong storyline has won them permission to make their point. It’s a funny ad which cleverly inverts expectations and flips the conventions of sports sponsorship. It pretends to downplay the product while it’s actually stressing the benefits it brings. It’s the right athlete, the right approach and an original, witty execution.