How Olipop scored a partnership with a soccer team despite Big Soda’s dominance in sports

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have long dominated the sports space, inking deals with athletes, leagues, stadiums—even the Super Bowl halftime show. Olipop, the prebiotic soda backed by investors including ​​Gwyneth Paltrow and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, is getting in the game, too.

Olipop took a swing at Big Soda about two years ago, when the brand ran a streaming campaign targeting sports fans and cola drinkers that mocked Pepsi Zero Sugar. On the sponsorship front, it’s been knocking on the doors of major sports teams, according to Steven Vigilante, its director of growth and talent partnerships. At first, though, they weren’t exactly receptive.

“I just kept running into the same issue, whether it was Coke or Pepsi contracts or massive, multi-seven-figure annual deals, and so I just sort of back-burnered it,” he told Marketing Brew. “Then everything changed.”

Vigilante met Allison Howard, president of the Kansas City Current and former VP of corporate partnerships for the Lakers, while the NWSL team was in the middle of constructing a new stadium set to open next year.

Both were interested in teaming up, and a deal was inked. In mid-April, the Current announced Olipop as its first soda brand partner. The deal is worth six figures and lasts through the 2023 season, according to Vigilante.

Love for local

Olipop happens to have connections to Kansas City. The brand works with midwestern and southern supermarket chain Hy-Vee, which has locations in Missouri, and both Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs are investors in Olipop, according to Vigilante. Mahomes and his wife, Brittany Mahomes, a former pro soccer player, are co-owners of the Current.

“Women’s soccer is a pretty obvious lane to play in for us, 80% of our customer base being female,” Vigilante added. “We’re not quite an NFL, beer-drinking guys’ product quite yet.”

Plus, Vigilante was already a believer in the merits of localized marketing. For instance, when Olipop did a pop-up in Columbus, Ohio, last year, “our sales skyrocketed in and around the Greater Ohio region,” he said. As the brand looks to increase annual sales “from $200 million to  a billion,” Olipop has to build its presence outside of coastal cities, Vigilante said.

“You can’t just be an LA, New York, Miami brand, which is where I think better-for-you brands stumble,” he said. “They start in New York or LA, and then they don’t ever take the time to invest in some of these third- and fourth-tier markets. They end up launching there at some point, and then no one knows who they are, and no one picks it up on the shelf.”

As for the Current, Howard said the first thing the team does before engaging in talks with potential partners is have “at least three synergies.” Luckily for Olipop, she said there were even more than that, describing the brand as on-the-rise, authentic, healthy, and fun.

Seal the deal

As part of the partnership, Olipop is featured on signs in the Current’s stadium and on an LED billboard off of a major highway near the team’s training center, Howard said. There’s also a social media component, she added, and opportunities for Olipop to potentially collaborate with other local Current partners like Betty Rae’s Ice Cream and Messenger Coffee.

The first year of the deal is serving as “kind of a tester,” but Vigilante said he would “absolutely love to figure out how to extend this,” including exploring pouring rights for the new stadium.

While the deal with the Current went through, that doesn’t necessarily mean Olipop has loosened Big Soda’s grip on the sports market.

“We just kept running into the same walls,” Vigilante said. “We’re in the Red Sox locker room, as an example, and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe we can be in the stadium.’ They get on the phone, they’re like, ‘Yeah, we actually can’t even be on the phone with you because Coke pays us $7 million a year.’”

That type of thing has happened multiple times, including with the Detroit Pistons and the Green Bay Packers, he shared.

Abby Murphy, a Red Sox spokesperson, told Marketing Brew that the team does “not have any type of formal relationship with Olipop.” But, according to Vigilante, Olipop has been stocked for the players—at their request—via a distributor. (At publication time, neither the Pistons nor the Packers had replied to requests for comment.)

Olipop is looking for other ways to align with athletes. The brand recently signed Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tyler Boyd to a social media partnership, and Vigilante is optimistic about its future prospects in sports.

“There are so many players drinking this stuff,” he said. “These guys are top-tier athletes—they’re not drinking heavily sugar-sweetened beverages. It’ll hit a tipping point at some point…You just work your way into the system, and hopefully we get big enough where they can’t ignore us anymore.”