In the realm of marketing, Gatorade is probably best known for splashy commercials featuring some of the world’s most famous athletes. However, a new effort behind the scenes of the PepsiCo-owned sports drink maker is putting social media quite literally at the center of the way Gatorade approaches marketing.

The company recently created the Gatorade Mission Control Center inside of its Chicago headquarters, a room that sits in the middle of the marketing department and could best be thought of as a war room for monitoring the brand in real-time across social media.

Mission Control

The room features six big monitors with five seats for Gatorade’s marketing team to track a number of data visualizations and dashboards –- also available on to employees on their desktops — that the company has custom built with partners including Radian6 and IBM. Below are a few of the visualizations that we got to check out in an interview last week:







This monitor is a visualization of tweets that are relevant to Gatorade; the company is tracking terms relating to its brand, including competitors, as well as its athletes and sports nutrition-related topics.







This monitor measures blog conversations across a variety of topics and shows how hot those conversations are across the blogosphere. The company also runs detailed sentiment analysis around key topics and product and campaign launches.







This video from Gatorade shows all of the different types of data being monitored from Mission Control.

Mission Control in Action







While certainly impressive visually, the first question that came to mind when being introduced to Gatorade Mission Control was how it’s actually being used on a day-to-day basis, and if its lead to product and marketing changes at the company that might not have happened without it. Gatorade’s Sr. Marketing Director, Consumer & Shopper Engagement Carla Hassan offered a few examples, starting with the company’s monitoring of its “Gatorade has evolved” campaign. The commercials featured a song by rap artist David Banner, which, Mission Control quickly saw was being heavily discussed in social media. Within 24 hours, they had worked with Banner to put out a full-length version of the song and distribute it to Gatorade followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook, respectively.

On a day-to-day basis, Gatorade’s tools are also being used for more conventional marketing tactics –- like optimizing landing pages and making sure followers are being sent to the top performing pages. As an example, the company says it’s been able to increase engagement with its product education (mostly video) by 250% and reduce its exit rate from 25% to 9%.

The Future

The goal of the project, says Hassan, is to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into largest participatory brand in the world.” To that end, the company’s not only monitoring its brand on social media, but giving its fans increased access to its athletes and scientists.

During the Super Bowl, for example, Gatorade let fans interact with a number of its NFL stars through Ustream as they tested out the new Gatorade G Series Pro. More recently, Hassan told me the company has been doing more regular small-scale live events, such as having a sports nutritionist answer questions from fans through Ustream and Facebook.

If that strategy is successful, expect to see the Mission Control approach applied to other businesses within PepsiCo says Bonin Bough, director of global social media at the company. “We believe what we’re building here is an example of a sandbox of tools and processes we can use across the organization,” he said.