Gatorade Super Bowl 2025

Because the end audience was ultimately “everyone watching,” the brief wasn’t about moving guests through an experience as much as it was about giving Gatorade a world that could consistently produce compelling, film-ready moments. The north star was clear: showcase Gatorade’s leadership in sports science, reinforce its credibility as the original inventor of the sports drink, and make that innovation story feel culturally current—not clinical. We didn’t need a fancy venue for that; we built it like what it truly was: a set on a studio lot, designed as a series of vignettes that play on camera.

Internally, the space even had a name: “The G-Lab”—a single narrative container for everything happening inside it. That mattered, because it let the studio read as one cohesive “place” in social content (“welcome to the G-Lab”), not a random collection of sets with cameras everywhere. We helped bring that narrative to life in partnership with the broader team supporting the storyline.

From there, we designed the studio as a sequence of distinct environments, each engineered for fast reconfiguration and strong visual payoff. We reimagined a familiar school science classroom as “Made in the Lab”—a high-tech Gatorade lab set for podcasting and content capture, with merch displayed like scientific equipment and layered with brand history (a space that could teach, not just decorate). Next came the GSSI Sweat Lab, a glass-enclosed gym inspired by the real work of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, where performance testing became spectacle—supported by a back-wall LED surface for data visualization and overhead lighting that kept everything camera-ready. Then we built “Proven on the Field”: a flexible, modular, 25-yard cropped football field designed for drills and athletic tests, with an overhead stadium-style lighting grid that could swing from bright, high-energy looks to dramatic darkness depending on what the shoot needed that day.

And because retail still matters in Super Bowl week, we built a separate, controlled back-of-house moment just for retailers and executives—a dark, minimal space that pulled guests toward a glowing bolt, then executed a choreographed reveal: a monolithic wall separating to unveil a presentation screen, followed by a second reveal exposing personalized lockers stocked with custom merch. It turned what could have been “just a deck” into a theatrical, high-impact surprise—one of the few areas where we went fully end-to-end directly with the client, including the presentation experience itself.

A key constraint shaped everything: this wasn’t an event build first—it was a filming environment. Lighting had to stay even and consistent across the studio (no harsh hot spots, no dead zones), and we treated that requirement as a design tool—creating an entry tunnel lighting moment with an overhead grid and turning the gym ceiling into a massive “light box” to keep the space both cinematic and shoot-friendly.

The turning point was the decision to commit fully to the content studio model—a shift that evolved from lessons in prior years and became the new Super Bowl formula: reach millions with athlete-led content, while still delivering a polished retailer experience that supports the business. The result was a space that looked like the future of Gatorade—where science, sport, and culture coexist in the same frame.