Overview

Accelerator Active Energy, a leading energy drink brand, sought to amplify their market presence by running athlete-drive marketing campaigns across the U.S. The goal was to create a hyper-targeted approach, driving traffic to specific retail locations while building brand loyalty among local communities.

The Challenge

Before partnering with Out2Win, Accelerator faced several challenges:

Inefficient Process

The athlete discovery, vetting, and onboarding process was slow and labor-intensive, requiring a three-person team to manage. Hours were spent toggling between team rosters and social media profiles to verify athletes’ information and assess their marketability. This manual approach not only consumed valuable time but also made it difficult to scale their efforts efficiently, delaying partnerships and limiting campaign reach.

Lack of Resourceful Data

Online team rosters were often incomplete, outdated, or missing direct links to athletes’ social media profiles, making the discovery process cumbersome and time-consuming. Even when Accelerator was able to identify potential athletes, they had no way to determine if those athletes' social media audiences aligned with a brand’s target demographic or campaign goals.

Difficulty Identifying High-Impact Local Athletes

Accelerator struggled to find athletes with both strong local influence and high engagement in their target regions. The brand needed athletes who could authentically connect with local communities and drive foot traffic to retail locations, but without the right tools, identifying them was inefficient and time-consuming. Limited visibility into key performance metrics—such as engagement rates, audience demographics, and regional follower concentration—made it even harder to determine which athletes could drive the most impact. As a result, they often missed opportunities to activate high-performing, hyper-local partnerships.

Accelerator needed a solution that would allow them to streamline athlete discovery, provide accurate data, and scale campaigns across multiple markets while ensuring each campaign resonated at a local level.

The solution

Out2Win provided Accelerator Active Energy with a powerful platform to streamline athlete discovery and target athletes with localized followings. Key features that made a difference included:

Faster Workflow

Out2Win transformed what was once a manual, time-consuming process into an efficient, streamlined workflow. Tasks that previously took days, like athlete vetting and social media verification, were reduced to minutes, freeing up the team to focus more on outreach and partnership building.

“Streamlined discovery, vetting, and onboarding, noticeably improving our team’s speed and effectiveness. The "lists" feature, in particular, boosts efficiency by allowing one team member to compile prospects while others review and conduct outreach independently.”

Smarter Athlete Selection

Out2Win made it easier for Accelerator to identify athletes who perfectly matched their campaign goals. With side-by-side social media metrics across Instagram and TikTok, the team could quickly compare engagement rates and audience demographics, ensuring they chose the most impactful athletes for each region. This data-driven approach improved decision-making accuracy and reduced the risk of selecting the wrong partners.

“Identifying and pre-vetting athletes that meet specific criteria is much easier. The side-by-side display of Instagram and TikTok metrics is saving us time and enhancing our decision-making accuracy.”

College Filters & Audience Location Filter

Accelerator used Out2Win’s Colleges Filter and Audience Location Filter to target hyper-local areas tied to their retail locations. By simply indicating the town, city, state, or region they wanted to focus on, they could instantly see which athletes had the highest audience concentration in that area. This allowed them to quickly identify the right athletes to deliver localized messaging that resonated with local audiences and drove foot traffic to key stores.

The Results

Accelerator has successfully activated over 50 athlete partnerships with followings ranging from 2K to 20K. These hyper-targeted, authentic collaborations were strategically designed to engage local communities and drive foot traffic to specific retail stores, resulting in more meaningful sales conversions.

Not only were Accelerator's campaigns significantly more impactful and performing better, but the team was also able to reduce time spent on athlete discovery, vetting, and execution by 80%, allowing them to focus on building stronger, high-value partnerships.