Gatorade’s Player Of The Year program is legendary, and one of the biggest honors in sports. However, when it comes to public awareness, the brand had struggled getting people to notice or care. Ahead of 2024, I was brought on to help reshape the program, with the objective of getting our Gen-Z audience to care about these young athletes, and engage with the content on social media.

The first thing we had to do, was ditch the outdated step & repeat photography and aim to make each player announcement a vibe. During the ideation process, we uncovered that Gen-Zers are far less likely to care about team sports than previous generations, however, they are just as likely to tune in when they feel a deeper connection to an individual athlete. I knew that we had to take a different approach with the content altogether. I pitched an editorial and fashion-forward program, in which the athletes traded in their jerseys for attire that would land them in Teen Vogue, rather than the expected publications, like Sports Illustrated. We worked with a professional stylist, and hired Joe Greer, one of the most popular photographers today, to bring a consistent, yet always fresh and cool look to every shoot throughout the season.

The program immediately exceeded all expectations. Previously, Player Of The Year content was consistently amongst the worst performing content on the Gatorade channels – but we saw an immediate boost, with nearly all the current Player of the Year content seeing more total engagement and positive sentiment than Gatorade’s roster athlete content.

Due to the success of POY 2024, I was asked to guide the program once again as the Creative Director in 2025.

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