How Liquid I.V. got written into the plot of ‘Off Campus’

There are a few things that are hard to miss in Prime Video’s hockey romance series Off Campus: shirtless workout montages, nostalgic musical moments, and Liquid I.V.

The hydration brand has a sweeping sponsorship deal with the show spanning ads, events, a landing page, and a four-episode integration into the plot. Main character Garrett Graham sips a Liquid I.V. at a bar; he and his teammate John Logan appear in an ad campaign for the brand, and ads for Liquid I.V. show up on the boards of their hockey rink at the fictional Briar University.

It’s product placement dialed way up, and it’s not the first time a brand has had a major integration into a sports streaming show this year. In April, Jake from State Farm appeared as a character in Netflix’s basketball comedy Running Point.

Naturally, the buzziest shows are exactly where brands want to be, and these kinds of integrations can lead to the cultural relevance marketers dream of. With steamy, heartthrob marketing campaigns experiencing something of a revival, the team at Liquid I.V. is betting that their embrace of all aspects of Off Campus will pay off among fans.

“Sometimes, things like brand safety and guardrails get in the way of participating in culture, and brands sometimes can get in their own way,” Aaron Jones, chief digital officer at Liquid I.V., told Marketing Brew. “It’s the No. 1 show globally right now [on Prime Video], and it’s being talked about like crazy, so you have to jump right in.”

But brands that wade knee-deep into a fandom—especailly one born on BookTok—may also find themselves on thin ice.

Glass half full

Liquid I.V. had a relationship with Amazon prior to Off Campus—including a sponsorship of The Summer I Turned Pretty last year—so the brand gets advanced looks at Amazon’s content slate. The two teams started discussing the Off Campus integration about a year and a half ago, Jones said.

His team was interested in the show early on for a number of reasons. It’s based on a book series of the same title by author Elle Kennedy that was already popular on BookTok, so it essentially had a built-in fandom, and the “bold, fun, and flirty” vibe of the show matched the tone of Liquid I.V.’s summer campaign emphasizing its sugar-free Ring Pop Cherry flavor, Jones said. Another plus: the show and the product are both nostalgic, he added.

And with major plot emphasis on athletics and nightlife, “this is a great intersection of culture and usage occasions” for Liquid I.V., Jones said.

But Off Campus is also deeply rooted in topics that might not always be deemed brand-safe, like sex and sexual assault. Ultimately, Jones said the way Liquid I.V. shows up is intended to respect “both the boundaries of the brand and the content,” and he’s so far encouraged by early signals since the show’s release.

Off Campus racked up 36 million viewers in less than two weeks, according to Prime Video, and Jones told us the campaign is beating brand expectations for Liquid I.V. Awareness and engagement are among his team’s KPIs, and the team is also looking at web traffic and conversions given that the campaign includes shoppable pause ads.

Show your credentials

Still, brand integrations into beloved IP can be tricky to navigate, Jones acknowledged.

“It’s really, really critical that all parties are invested in being authentic and true to the source material, and to holding the creative bar very, very high,” he said. “We’ve all seen brand partnerships that have maybe stuck out like a sore thumb in certain areas…so it was really important for us to be like, ‘Okay, how do we have an authentic voice in this script?’”

The Liquid I.V. team was in talks with Amazon before Off Campus was cast, Jones said, and the brand worked with the show’s writers on concepts for brand and product integration that they all felt made sense in the plot. It also helps that Liquid I.V. has done real-life sports marketing, including a Super Bowl ad and Formula 1 activations.

Jones said he hopes even the traditional ad, which features Off Campus stars Ella Bright and Belmont Cameli in character, feels additive to fans of the show. If recent campaigns starring the leading men of Heated Rivalry, Off Campus’s predecessor in the hockey romance category, are any indicator, fans of the genre tend to appreciate any content they can get.

“So much of fandom now happens beyond the actual series itself,” Jones said. “It happens on social, it happens behind the scenes, it happens through advertising…and so what brands really allow content to do is to live beyond just the episodes that live on Prime Video.”