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Marketing Brew

Olympics

Alyssa Meyers

marketingbrew.com

Something sweet is coming to the US Soccer Federation.

Ferrara, the parent company of candy brands including Nerds, Laffy Taffy, and Trolli, was named as the official candy sponsor of US Soccer last month as part of a multiyear deal that will carry through next summer’s FIFA World Cup and the 2028 LA Olympics.

The deal marks Ferrara’s first foray into soccer, but CMO Greg Guidotti and his team are no strangers to other major cultural pillars and are applying what they learned from events like two 

 ad campaigns in a row as they develop the brand’s soccer platform, he said.

“When you think about the Super Bowl, it’s a sport that’s in the hearts and minds of consumers at that time frame,” Guidotti told Marketing Brew. “We just take the two O’s out and put a U in. It’s football in the summer…When something is thematically relevant in the market, it helps you drive displays and consumer interest.”

Ferrara isn’t just new to soccer—it’s never struck up a “broad, multiyear sponsorship” with any team or league before, Guidotti said. Its brands have, however, shown up at a range of massive events in the past few years, including Nerds, which advertised during the past two Super Bowls and showed up at this year’s 

 music festival, and Brach’s, which showed up for the first time during the 2023 

When entering into those partnerships, Guidotti said he was motivated by considering “what’s meaningful to the consumer” during certain timeframes. In the fall, when Ferrara is focused on selling Brach’s candy canes, the Macy’s parade provides a big stage to reach consumers. Over the summer, it’s all about music festivals. And for the foreseeable future—from the upcoming World Cup in North America to the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil to LA28—consumers will be increasingly focused on soccer.

“Soccer is really going to be in the hearts and minds of consumers,” Guidotti said. “What I appreciate about US Soccer is it’s going to be so relevant for the next few years.”

In the lead-up to the competition, Guidotti and his team are planning to activate using the same general approach they did for the Super Bowl, like rolling out product news, setting up interactive retail displays, partnering with athletes on social content, and doing limited-time product drops, he said. Paid media efforts like out-of-home ads in and around stadiums will ramp up into the summer, he added.

The Ferrara team is also working with US Soccer to figure out additional ways to activate at matches and with players to help grow the profiles of both the sport and the candy brands, Guidotti said.

“This is an emotional category,” he said. “We know that some of the US players will have favorite candies; we’ll have them talk about those candies…It almost writes itself.”

All that being said, “we’re very much in the planning stages of activation” still, including announcing which brands will be involved, Guidotti told us. With the World Cup less than a year out, soccer sponsors are in various phases of their marketing plans, with some having rolled out campaigns in time with the 

While Guidotti and his team plan for next summer’s tournament, he’s simultaneously thinking about the Women’s World Cup in 2027.

“We know how strong women’s soccer is,” he said. “The relevance is inherently there.”

When it comes to next year’s Super Bowl, though, Guidotti said it’s too soon to say if Nerds will make a return. For now, he’s focused on figuring out how to use the US Soccer platform to drive sales and increase market share and household penetration for the products that ultimately get featured alongside the sport.

“If we win on those fronts, we’ll be in good shape, and if we’re not, we’ll figure out how to do it better,” Guidotti said. “We’re committed to this platform, but I think we anticipate that it’ll do well.”

Correction 10/15/2025: This piece has been corrected to remove a reference to a non-Ferrara-owned brand and to clarify the kind of candy that Ferrara focuses on marketing in the fall.

Ferrara is sweet on soccer

The candy company is applying lessons from tentpoles like the Super Bowl to the FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics.

Ed Beadle admits that the marketing team at American Honda Motor Co. Inc. is competitive.

So when the VP of digital services and marketing and his team found out that the organizers of the LA28 Olympics and Paralympics were making venue naming rights available for the first time in Olympic history, they were motivated to make sure that the Honda Center in Anaheim, California, retained its name for the Games.

“The idea of somebody else owning it and then having to cover up our signage, that was one of those things,” Beadle told Marketing Brew. “We were like, ‘Ah, I don’t like that.’”

Honda eventually locked in the naming rights, and last month, Honda Center was announced as one of the first named venues for the event. While the naming rights aren’t the entire reason Honda became a sponsor of LA28 (its official sponsorship was announced prior to the Honda Center news), they were a significant part of the conversation, Beadle said.

“I wouldn’t call it the cake, but it’s icing,” he said. “The fact they let us do it—it’s incredible.”

We spoke to Beadle about Honda’s broader approach to the Games, from its plans for the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics next year through a Team USA partnership to the brand’s intentions to show up in LA during the 2028 Games beyond the Honda Center.

 in a LinkedIn post that he originally thought an Olympic sponsorship was “something of a long shot,” he told us that he felt it was his job to consider it seriously, anyway.

“I’m always thinking about the math, and when it comes to the expense of something of this scale, it’s big,” he said. “It’s not like I'm pitching a new ad campaign.”

As conversations progressed, it became increasingly clear that the sponsorship opportunity could make sense. Honda’s US operations were originally established in LA, and its headquarters are still in Southern California, making the location alone significant for the brand. The company’s slogan is also “The Power of Dreams,” and “there’s no better sport[ing event], period, that showcases individuals’ dreams” than the Olympics, he said.

Like Beadle, Honda’s CFO wanted “to see the math” before signing off on such a big deal, but Beadle said it wasn’t a hard sell.

“The Olympics is such an amazing heartstring puller,” he said. “Sometimes in marketing, you really have to explain, especially in this day and age, ‘What is this property? What does it do?’ But with the Olympics, everyone got it immediately.”

As a founding partner of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games and the official automotive partner of Team USA, Honda will provide a fleet of accessible vehicles and other mobility products to the Games, and it will integrate into NBCUniversal’s coverage. Many of the other specifics of the activation are still in the works, according to Beadle, but the KPIs are already becoming clear.

Through the Olympics, Beadle said his team is looking to build on existing brand trust by “increasing the emotional appeal of Honda,” measuring emotional connections to the brand now, and then again after the LA Games. Individual Honda-owned brands like Acura have their own “sub-goals,” he said. His team is also already measuring stats like impressions and sentiment tied to the sponsorship.

American Honda is getting into the Olympic spirit well ahead of LA28, serving as the official premier technology and automotive partner of the USA Bobsled/Skeleton team for Milano Cortina and beyond.

Honda engineers are already working with the team on “engineering data, analysis, and [equipment] design,” and as part of the deal, the Acura logo will appear “on their sleds in both national and international competitions,” according to the company. Certain gear like enhanced helmets will be ready for use in time for the 2026 Games, but a fully redesigned vehicle likely won’t be ready until 2030, Beadle said. The rest of Honda’s marketing for Milano Cortina is focused on media buys rather than on-the-ground activations, he told us.

Come 2028, though, Honda brands will be involved in other Olympic sports, including volleyball. Honda Center will house Olympic volleyball, which Beadle chalked up to “luck of the draw,” since the sport is played for the full two-week duration of the Games and has been 

In addition to IRL marketing around LA28, Beadle said he’s “staffing up” on the social side to prepare to react quickly to viral moments that happen around the Olympics. Now more than ever, the Games have a reputation for creating somewhat unexpected stars (like Team USA athletes Ilona Maher and Stephen Nedoroscik, both of whom found Paris Olympic fame on social), and Beadle is hoping for the opportunity to form partnerships that feel natural if certain Olympic athletes who align with the Honda brand find themselves in the spotlight.

“Our key filter is authenticity, and not being reactionary,” he said, later adding that “it is gold” when celebrities like athletes are already fans of the brand.

From Left to Right: Janet Evans, LA28 Chief Athlete Officer; Casey Wasserman, LA28 Chairperson & President; Kazuhiro Takizawa, American Honda President & CEO; Sarah Hirshland, U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) CEO; Reynold Hoover, LA28 CEO; John Slusher, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Properties (USOPP) CEO

How Honda became one of the first naming-rights partners of the Olympics

Honda is gearing up for LA28, when the Honda Center in Anaheim, California, will host Olympic volleyball games.

Olympic excitement seemed at a peak this year. Viewership was up 82% from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, according to NBCU, and use of the term “

” presumably rose by an even larger margin.

The Paralympics, which are held a few weeks after the Olympics, have also attracted more attention from viewers, networks, and brands. This year, NBCU rolled out what it called “the most comprehensive coverage of the Paralympics in US media history,” and as of Sept. 5, coverage on NBC was averaging 1.32 million viewers, up 49% from the Tokyo Paralympics. Ad sales were also up more than 60% from Tokyo, per NBCU.

The US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) has seen a similar increase in sponsorship interest in the last few years, thanks to a concerted effort to boost awareness around the Paralympics, especially in the leadup to LA28, Katie Bynum, the organization’s chief of strategy and growth, told Marketing Brew.

“The overall coverage and conversation is growing, and with that, brand interest is growing, too,” Bynum said. “It’s only going to grow more as a result of hosting the LA games here in four short years.”

Part of the USOPC’s plan to promote the Paralympics involves pairing it closely with the Olympics—and encouraging sponsors to do the same. Team USA’s brand platform includes both Olympic and Paralympic athletes, and aims to “drive awareness and more understanding of the Paralympics,” Jess Park, chief of brand and fan engagement at the USOPC 

Some brands took similar approaches to their marketing around the games. Team USA partner Reese’s featured Olympic and Paralympic athletes in its 

, and worldwide sponsor Samsung gave every Olympic and Paralympic athlete a special-edition phone to capture “victory selfies” from the podium. Nike continued its “

” which spotlights Paralympic athletes. During the Paralympics, Nike and the USOPC also announced a one-year career program for athletes focused on disability inclusion.

Toyota, the presenting sponsor of NBCU’s Paralympic coverage, ran six ads featuring 20 Olympic and Paralympic athletes this year, including one 

 Canadian Paralympic track and field athlete Marissa Papaconstantinou, according to Dedra DeLilli, Toyota North America’s group manager of sponsorship strategy, integration, and activation.

Sponsors can play an important role in elevating the profile of the Paralympics, but Bynum said “it’s hard and unfair to suggest to brands that they should figure out how to do this storytelling and activation” on their own.

This year, the USOPC created more content that marketers could support, like the “

” content package, which Xfinity sponsored ahead of Paris. That program, which followed athletes through the qualification process, will continue for Milano Cortina 2026, and Bynum said that kind of athlete-centric content has worked well.

For the Paralympics, the USOPC has tapped athletes like Olympic long jump gold medalist 

, who’s married to Paralympic track and field athlete Hunter Woodhall, to create content, as well as others including 

. On the day of the Para Opening Ceremony, the Team USA accounts across social platforms saw about an 84% increase in engagement compared to the day prior, according to the USOPC.

“Hearing directly from athletes is a great way to…reach new audiences, even beyond just our own coverage,” Bynum said. “There’s a theme here about putting athletes at the center of our storytelling.”

Paralympic athletes and governing bodies of para sports—

—can benefit from support more often than once every four years, presenting a potential opening for sponsors, Gartner marketing analyst Chris Ross told Marketing Brew.

“There’s opportunity for brands, from an authenticity perspective, to say, ‘Hey, we’re not just putting our name on this or featuring a Paralympic athlete in our advertising during the Olympics, but we’re actually supporting this sport or these athletes all year round,’” he said.

 of Paralympic athletes, is the founding partner of an organization dedicated to increasing involvement in para sports, and Toyota, which has been the official mobility sponsor for both the International Paralympic Committee and the International Olympics Committee since 2015, upped its commitment to Paralympic athletes in the wake of the pandemic-induced postponement the Tokyo games, according to DeLilli.

“We took immediate action to extend all of our Team Toyota athlete contracts, but at a time when the world was in such a dark place, that didn’t seem like enough,” she said in an email.

The brand set up its US Paralympic Fund in 2021, which offers 

 to all US Paralympians. Since then, the $6 million fund has provided support to nearly 90% of Team USA Paralympic athletes, according to DeLilli. But the space can still use more engaged sponsors year-round, Bynum said. 

“Whether they’re direct-to-consumer brands or B2B brands, there’s just a way to use their media or their reach to drive awareness and engagement, and I think that that can certainly happen more,” she said. “There’s an opportunity to sponsor and storytell with more Paralympic athletes for a longer period of time.”

Olympic and Paralympic athletes hold Olympic torches

How the USOPC is looking to build Paralympic hype

“The overall coverage and conversation is growing, and with that brand interest is growing, too,” USOPC Chief of Strategy and Growth Katie Bynum said.

Paralympic hype was high this summer. The USOPC wants it higher for LA28

Ryan Barwick

Hurry—the world only has a few more days to bone up on water polo and fencing.

The 2024 Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony, airing Friday, will kick off two weeks of international competition, and advertisements and brands will be squeezed in between national anthems and slow-motion shots of athletic melodrama.

We at Marketing Brew thought it might make sense to run down some of the sponsorships and ad sales stats for the games, which run through August 11.

After subsequent Olympics ratings disappointments in 2021 and 2022, it’s looking like 2024 could be a comeback year for NBCUniversal, which owns the US broadcast rights to the Olympics through 2032.

During the day, the broadcaster plans to offer at least nine hours of coverage, including live coverage of the swimming, track and field, and gymnastics finals across both linear TV and its streaming service Peacock. In prime time, the broadcaster will air a recap of each day’s competitions. Snoop Dogg and Peyton Manning will 

 NBC mainstay Mike Tirico for broadcasting duties, because, sure, why not?

In April, Dan Lovinger, NBCU’s president of Olympic and Paralympic partnerships, told reporters that the company had already brought in $1.2 billion in ad sales against the games and was on track to bring in the 

 in Olympic history. The broadcaster has cited the benefits of a more favorable time difference than the previous two Olympics in Tokyo and Beijing, as well as the Covid protocols at those games that made some components of the broadcast more difficult. The 2021 Summer Games in Tokyo games 

 about 15.5 million prime-time viewers, about half as many as the 2012 Summer Games in London.

Meanwhile, Peacock will serve as a “hub” for the games, giving viewers a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style experience around the broadcaster’s coverage, complete with an 

 of Al Michaels’s voice providing audio commentary. There will also be Peacock exclusives, like a highlights show featuring Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson.

 Coca-Cola, Airbnb, Visa, and Procter & Gamble are among the brands participating in the official Olympic Partner Programme, which could mean spending anywhere from $50 million to $200 million, according to 

 Local luxury brand powerhouse LVMH paid a 

 €150 million ($163 million) to sponsor the games, and will be “designing medals, dressing French athletes, and providing the champagne for VIP events,” per Bloomberg.

Team USA has its own list of official sponsors, including Michelob Ultra, Nike, Ralph Lauren, and Delta. And plenty of other brands didn’t ink formal deals but are activating around the Olympics anyway, either through 

 or through alternate platforms and content.

Putting aside any possible record-breaking performances from the athletes themselves, there will be lots of firsts during the summer games. For the first time in Olympic history, there will be an 

 between women and men athletes in the games, capping off what has already been a banner year for women’s sports.

In the run-up to the games, a few media execs pointed out that marketer interest in campaigning around women athletes and teams is similarly high when it comes to this year’s Olympics.

“Brands know that the Olympics are a time when brands know that women’s sports and athletes are front and center,” Rachel Quon, head of operations for the media company Just Women’s Sports, said in an email. “They’re realizing that this is a growing and valuable audience.”

a building in Paris promoting Paris 2024 Olympic Games on the facade, with a French flag flying above 

What advertisers need to know about the 2024 Paris Olympics

Expect to see Snoop Dogg and a lot of luxury brands.

The Olympics is expected to be one of the biggest broadcast events of the summer. But for many younger viewers, they might spend more time watching the competition and the content that surrounds it on social platforms like TikTok than on the TV screen.

That means that the organizing committee itself, as well as the advertisers looking to target audiences interested in the games, are preparing for an Olympic-sized presence on social media to accompany the competition on NBC. In other words, expect Olympics-related ads, content, and shoulder programming to descend on just about every screen ahead of the Opening Ceremony.

“It’s no longer enough to make a beautiful TV ad and put an official logo at the end of it,” Rahul Titus, global head of influence at Ogilvy, told Marketing Brew. “You need to make sure you’re looking at it as a connected ecosystem, where you’re activating your athletes on the ground, on social media, pre the event, post-event, and that’s a much more complicated and complex system. Obviously, there’s beauty in it and it’s a very high-reward system if you get it right, but it’s tougher.”

The TikTokification of the Olympics isn’t limited to advertisers. The organizing committee for Paris 2024, for example, is using social channels like TikTok to amplify its messaging around the games, according to Augustin Pénicaud, VP of Havas Play, Havas’s sports and entertainment division that has been working with the organizing committee and several official brand partners. While TV remains central to the Olympic experience, “you cannot be solely and only on TV,” he said.

National teams also realize the power of branching beyond broadcast. Team Great Britain inked an official partnership with TikTok, Team Canada and brand partner Lululemon 

 on the platform, and Team USA first released a 

 across social. Even Olympics broadcaster NBCUniversal is giving TikTok, Snap, YouTube, Meta, and Overtime 

 to the competition and is promoting the games through its 

Social media isn’t exactly a new ballgame for brands, but compared to past Olympics, they’re leaning further in, according to Titus.

“I’m calling it the first TikTok Olympics,” he said, later adding that “it’s quite refreshing to see that whole ecosystem being fully utilized for the first time.”

While official sponsorships and broadcast ads are still valuable, even major brands with access to those assets are increasingly embracing social. Coca-Cola, an official Olympic partner that’s running a 360-campaign including TV ads, is more focused on social than during prior Olympics, in part because of the platform’s reach among Gen Z audiences, according to Robin Triplett, VP of North America integrated marketing.

 showing up…and each brand has its own social voice and audience that we can engage with during this special event,” Triplett said in an email. “Social media also provides more opportunity to quickly act upon the events taking place, cheer on our incredible athlete partners, and engage directly with the consumer in real time.”

Athleta, which is running its first-ever linear TV ad during the Olympics and is activating on the ground in Paris, is also using social in a “significant way,” CMO Ilona Aman said. Team USA sponsors like 

 are also stretching their campaigns across platforms including linear, digital, social, and audio.

Beyond TikTok, brands are turning to emerging media platforms such as newsletter and podcast companies that create sports content to help expand the reach of their Olympic efforts, and several of those companies’ executives told Marketing Brew that they’ve experienced a boost in revenue thanks to the interest.

Podcast company Acast has fielded some recent advertiser interest in sports-related podcasts like 

n, according to Tom Roach, Acast’s commercial strategy director for the UK. And New York Times-owned The Athletic, which is covering the Olympics for the first time, began having conversations with brands about sponsorships a couple of years ago, with renewed brand interest a few months out from the games, according to Chief Commercial Officer Seb Tomich; Nike and 

 are sponsoring some of the publication’s Olympics content, and there are several other brands with campaigns that have yet to go live, he said.

Despite the interest, competition for pitching brands about Olympic campaigns has been stiff among media companies, Tomich said. “It wasn’t just us versus ESPN on every pitch,” he said.

The Gist, a sports media brand started in 2017, is working on Olympic campaigns with brands like 

, and is partnering with Adidas to create content on the ground in Paris, according to co-founder Jacie deHoop. Just Women’s Sports, a women’s sports-focused media company, is covering the games beyond its site and newsletter to position itself as an “easily accessible second-screen experience” on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, and its podcast network, Jackie Caldwell, its head of content, said in an email.

For much of the company’s audience, “we’re the only sports content that they consume,” deHoop said. “They’re going to be scrolling through their feeds during the day, they might listen to the podcast, and that’s going to be the Olympic content that they consume. They’re not necessarily going to watch a broadcast, which is just wild, but we definitely factor that in.”

Whether it’s working with sports media companies or creating social content, the options offer advertisers creative ways to get involved with the Olympics with or without official ties to the rings, Joe Caporoso, president of sports and entertainment media company Team Whistle, which has been working with Snapchat and Meta to cover the games, and selling sponsorships since late last year, said.

“Everyone’s going to be talking about the Olympics in the back half of the summer,” he said. “It only comes every four years…so you don’t want to sit that out.”

Hand holding phone with screen showing track runners

Brands are turning to alternative platforms for Olympic activations

“I’m calling it the first TikTok Olympics,” one executive told us.

For Olympic activations, brands are turning to platforms beyond broadcast 

Around the time of the last Summer Olympics in 2021, the Gap-owned women’s activewear brand made news when it signed a deal with Simone Biles, who 

 in favor of Athleta. For this year’s Paris games, which kick off next week, the brand is going big with Biles again with its first-ever national linear TV ad and other marketing activations revolving around its “Power of She” platform designed to support women and girls in athletics.

“We’re not doing this because it’s trendy,” CMO Ilona Aman told Marketing Brew. “It’s where we’ve been. Now, it’s just putting that on a bigger platform and a bigger stage with the right partners that share the same values.”

The decision to run an ad on national TV for the first time is largely about relevance, Aman said. Since she joined the brand from Fabletics earlier this year, the Athleta leadership team has been focused on “reinvigorating the brand,” she said, and the Olympics presents a major opportunity to do so.

“The Olympics is one of the very few times in sports where people come together and actually watch things live on television, versus just the catch-up or the highlights that they might find on social media,” Aman said.

The ad features Biles flipping in slow-motion to show the “insane aerodynamics of what Simone can do,” Aman said, and is set to the refrain “because she can” from the song “Oral” by Björk and Rosalía. It’s a not-so-subtle reference to 

 to a question about why she continues to perform such difficult moves, in which she said, “Because I can.”


The spot started running on June 15 and is set to continue through the games on NBC and Peacock, as well as YouTube and social media. It’s also slated to appear on Netflix, which is releasing a docuseries about Biles starting July 17—from July 1 through September 14.

In addition to the TV ad, Athleta is extending its campaign to the Marais district in Paris. For about two weeks, the brand is hosting a series of events meant to celebrate the progress women have made in sports, according to Aman.

The activations include panel conversations in partnership with other women-led brands like the Female Quotient and Goop, in addition to various movement-focused classes to help people on the ground at the games manage “the chaos of the hustle and bustle,” Aman said. The brand will use those events to generate additional content for Athleta’s social channels to reach the US audience.

Back in the states, Athleta will host workouts during the games period at its stores in nine markets including Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, as well as run a postcard initiative tied to the “Power of She” platform, where Athleta is making postcards available in its stores for shoppers to write notes about women they admire. For each postcard that’s filled out, the company will donate a dollar to its The Power of She Fund, which gives grants to women and girls in partnership with the Women’s Sport Foundation.

In the run-up to the Olympics, Athleta also sponsored the ESPYs, and presented the award for the best college athlete in women’s sports, which went to 

. On the heels of the games, the brand plans to lean into its recently inked partnership with Katie Ledecky, Aman said. All in all, she said Athleta’s work during and around the games is meant to strengthen its connection with women consumers and boost the brand’s overall relevance in culture.

“For us, it’s definitely the long game,” Aman said. “The summer is definitely where we’re overinvesting and having that dialog with [women] to then set us up and use that as a catalyst as we continue to grow with [them] in the seasons to come.”

Gymnast Simone Biles in Athleta's Power of She Olympics campaign

Athleta goes big for its Olympics campaign with first national linear TV ad

The women’s activewear brand is also activating on social and on the ground in Paris and the US to connect with its audience around the games.

GoGo Squeez is break dancing its way to a new brand image.

The snack brand, best known for its squeezable applesauce pouches, has largely come to be associated with babies or toddlers, but its latest product and marketing push is meant to tap into a slightly older, more active audience.

To help grow the brand beyond its original target demo—households with kids ages six to 12—GoGo Squeez designed a new fruit blend with electrolytes that’s meant to be used as a sports snack, and to promote it, the brand has partnered with Logan “Logistx” Edra, who’s competing in the first-ever Olympic breaking event—the competitive form of break dancing.

“We’re on a journey to age up our brand,” CMO Mark Anthony Edmonson told Marketing Brew. “We are now seeing young adults and teens recognizing that this is something that they missed out on,” he later added. “They forgot about us, and now they’re returning back to the brand.”

The idea to associate with sports came about after Edmonson’s team noticed that consumers were using the product while they were getting active, like bringing it on hikes or bike rides. Beyond that, some sports nutritionists the brand was working with mentioned recommending it to clients, and the team spotted it on the sidelines of some professional sports games, he said.

Breaking is certainly one of the lesser-known Olympic sports, but that’s one of the reasons GoGo Squeez was drawn to it, according to Edmonson. In addition, breaking is popular among the brand’s new target audience of teens and young adults, he said.

“We’ve always been an innovative brand,” he said. “We wanted to partner with a sport that was the first, and something that could actually be big.”

GoGo Squeez signed Edra because she’s already 

: She started breaking when she was seven, and now has multiple world championships under her belt, including the 2021 Red Bull BC One World Final. Even better, she was also already a GoGo Squeez consumer, Edmonson added.

While GoGo Squeez isn’t an official Olympic partner, there’s no question that the event 

 to niche sports when they’re in the limelight every four years.

GoGo Squeez’s work with Edra is part of its “Fun-damentals” campaign promoting the new sports pouch. It includes a video ad running on social set to an original song created for the brand by Gen Z rapper and actor Connor Price, which shows young adults participating in sports like basketball, skateboarding, and pickleball.

The deal with Edra has already generated social content for platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where breaking videos are gaining some traction among young audiences, Edmonson said. GoGo Squeez is also leveraging Snapchat filters as part of the campaign.

“Social is where our consumer is today,” he said. “We believe that that’s where we’ll have the highest engagement amongst our target audience, which is the teens and young adults. In addition to that, we know how social is infectious. It spreads like wildfire, so we were hoping that…will truly allow us to not only tell our brand story, but also share [Edra’s] story as well.”