Olipop is now the official soda of Los Angeles Golf Club, the two organizations exclusively shared with Marketing Brew.
The deal, LAGC’s first brand sponsorship, is set to run through 2025, including for the current season of TGL, the team-based golf league created by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy in 2022. It marks the latest in a series of major sports sponsorships for Olipop as the brand looks to build its base with new consumer groups and differentiate itself amid growing competition in the prebiotic-soda category.
“I love being early and new in things,” Steven Vigilante, Olipop’s director of strategic partnerships, told us. “You get to beta test stuff together, and we’re just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. I love that, as opposed to entering into some big old thing with all these rules defined already. We’re writing the rules together here.”
Teeing off
Olipop has been developing its sports sponsorship portfolio across leagues like the NWSL, MLS, NBA, and Nascar in the past several years, and the partnership with LAGC marks the brand’s first foray into golf, according to Vigilante. Stepping into golf is part of an effort to gain ground with new demographics, which, in this case, is millennial men, he said.
“We’ve obviously way over-indexed on the young, female demo over the years,” Vigilante said. “The bigger we get, the more we hear from husbands and boyfriends that they’re drinking Olipop, too. We just hit 50% brand awareness nationally in January, and we’re crossing that chasm where we really need to be a product for everybody.”
Vigilante said he explored several opportunities in golf as a way to reach millennial men, but with endemic sports sponsors like Gatorade and Adidas and luxury brands like Rolex and Lexus spending big budgets on traditional golf sponsorships with organizations like the PGA, the brand found itself essentially priced out.
So, like some other brands looking for up-and-coming teams and leagues to partner with, Olipop looked for greener pastures—or, in this case, fairways.
“I needed to find the challenger opportunity that makes sense, and LAGC ticked every box,” he said.
Par for the course?
Olipop wasn’t the first brand LAGC considered as a partner, Neal Hubman, co-founder and president, told us, but he was looking to break the traditional golf sponsorship mold and find a brand to collaborate with LAGC on projects that could help make golf more accessible to communities that aren’t historically associated with the sport.
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“It’s a new league, and that means less of what you normally would see in golf and more of a true partnership than a sponsorship, where we can do things together,” Hubman said. “We can cocreate together, and it could be something where we can test and iterate and be nimble.”
The sponsorship, which officially kicked off on Jan. 14 in time with LAGC’s first match of the 2025 season, will include in-stadium integrations and will focus on community events throughout the year, not just during the TGL season. Olipop and LAGC are still discussing the details, Hubman said, but there’s already plenty of Olipop in the LAGC owners’ box, and the soda recently made an appearance on the X account of Alexis Ohanian, Serena Williams’ husband. The two co-own the team with their daughter Olympia and Venus Williams.
Zoom out
Beyond LAGC, Olipop is looking to do more in both golf and tennis this year, Vigilante said. He’s exploring media partners to amplify the LAGC deal, and Olipop has a few yet-to-be-announced entertainment projects tied to golf that are in the works.
Competition continues to bubble up among prebiotic-soda brands, with Poppi running Super Bowl ads for two years in a row, and both PepsiCo and Coca-Cola venturing into the prebiotic-soda space. Vigilante is hoping Olipop’s approach of working with upstart teams and leagues will help the brand stand out in the sports world.
“Especially with Coke and Pepsi launching players now in the prebiotic category, I will be very curious how that impacts us and the conversations I’m having, because in theory, they can claim those categories” in sports sponsorship, Vigilante said. “I just don’t know if teams are going to give it to them.”