ARCHIVEGatorade Brings the Inner Game to the NFL Season With You Know We Got IT
Gatorade's "You Know We Got IT" is a 2024 film campaign created by TBWA\Chiat\Day L.A. that positions the brand's core promise around internal drive and mental resilience, launching in the United States in September 2024 to coincide with the opening of the NFL season and directly reviving the brand's long-running "Is It In You?" platform.
The campaign centres on a single, precisely defined idea: the game is played on the field, but won on the inside. That thesis, drawn directly from the campaign's own language, animates a 45-second spot built around what the creative team calls "The Chant" — a locker-room-style call-and-response ritual that functions as both the film's emotional engine and its central creative device, as reported by The Drum. The chant moves across every level of organised American football: the NFL, NCAA competition, high school programmes, and flag football, making the argument that "IT" — that intangible internal quality — is universal to the sport regardless of the stage on which it is played.
Narrated by Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson and featuring a roster of active NFL players including Josh Allen, Myles Garrett, Justin Jefferson, Puka Nacua, Shedeur Sanders, Aidan Hutchinson, and George Kittle, the film operates as a deliberate statement of Gatorade's ongoing relationship with elite American football culture. Mexican flag-football star Diana Flores also appears, extending the campaign's reach beyond the professional men's game, as highlighted in The Drum's weekly advertising roundup published September 6, 2024. The campaign directs audiences to Gatorade.com, anchoring a performance-focused brand narrative to a direct commerce destination. Clapboard rates this campaign 68 out of 100, reflecting strong cultural legibility and athlete star power set against the inherent challenge of refreshing a platform the brand has visited many times before.
ARCHIVEGatorade treats mental toughness as a market differentiator rather than a secondary brand attribute. The strategic logic of "You Know We Got IT" rests on a documented shift in how athletes and sports consumers in the United States understand peak performance: physical replenishment remains necessary, but psychological readiness is increasingly understood as the variable that separates competitors. By personifying this quality as "IT" — something you either carry inside you or do not — the campaign converts a category-wide functional claim into a character-based brand property.
The timing of the campaign is precise. Its September 2024 launch aligned directly with NFL season kickoff, as reported by The Drum and confirmed by iSpot.tv, placing Gatorade at the cultural centre of the United States' most-watched sports moment of the calendar year. This positioning matters in a competitive context where PepsiCo-owned Gatorade faces sustained pressure from Coca-Cola's BodyArmor, which has aggressively targeted younger and female athletes since its full acquisition by Coca-Cola, and from Electrolit, a fast-growing premium hydration brand that has expanded its United States footprint through sports sponsorship. Both competitors have leaned into functional and lifestyle messaging, making Gatorade's pivot toward internal motivation a meaningful point of strategic differentiation.
The global sports drink market reached an estimated $24.23 billion in 2024, representing 6.0% year-over-year growth from 2023, according to The Business Research Company as cited by TowardsFnb. Mordor Intelligence estimated the 2024 market at $26.48 billion, projecting a compound annual growth rate of 5.32% through 2030, with isotonic drinks identified as the leading segment — a category Gatorade has historically dominated in the United States. "You Know We Got IT" functions not only as a brand campaign but as a defensive act within a growing and increasingly contested market, reasserting Gatorade's emotional ownership of performance culture at the moment the season begins.
Director Stuart McIntyre directed the spot. McIntyre shot the film in Toronto in July 2024, several weeks before its September release, according to copywriter Drew Ruiz writing on his own professional site, drew-ruiz.com. That production timeline allowed the campaign to arrive fully formed at the NFL season's opening weekend, rather than as a reactive launch assembled under broadcast pressure.
The creative foundation was laid by Drew Ruiz, copywriter at TBWA\Chiat\Day L.A., who has publicly described the specific musical influence behind the spot's structure. As Ruiz stated on drew-ruiz.com, he wrote the 45-second piece inspired by the clap-and-response cadence of Soulja Boy's "Donk," deliberately constructing the film's rhythm around that call-and-response energy. The result is a spot that feels less like a conventional sports drink advertisement and more like a piece of participatory sports culture — a chant that viewers can complete alongside the athletes on screen.
The decision to shoot across multiple levels of American football — NFL, NCAA, high school, and flag football — was not incidental. As Ruiz noted on drew-ruiz.com, the brief was to show the breadth of football, and the production delivers on that intention by presenting the same internal fire in a high school locker room and on an NFL field with equivalent visual weight. The inclusion of Diana Flores, a prominent figure in the flag football world, reinforces this deliberately wide frame without diluting the NFL-season energy that anchors the film commercially. The chant device carries all of this across every setting, functioning as both a compositional structure and a brand mnemonic that extends the "Is It In You?" platform into a new sonic and visual register.
The campaign generated documented audience engagement within its first months of release. According to data visible on the campaign's published record, the film accumulated 51,046 views, 738 likes, and 110 comments as of the time of submission, offering a baseline measure of earned engagement within the advertising community and among direct viewers of the asset.
Trade coverage provides additional evidence of cultural traction. The Drum assigned reporter Audrey Kemp to cover the campaign's launch on September 4, 2024, describing it as a star-studded and inclusive NFL-season launch — trade-press placement that signals meaningful industry recognition for a campaign of this type. The Drum's weekly advertising roundup on September 6, 2024, returned to the campaign a second time to specifically highlight Diana Flores's inclusion, indicating that the flag-football angle landed as a genuine editorial talking point rather than a footnote, as reported by The Drum.
No independently verified sales lift, brand-tracking movement, or media-spend figures for "You Know We Got IT" are publicly available at the time of writing. What the structural evidence does confirm is that the campaign succeeded in placing Gatorade at the cultural centre of the 2024 NFL season opening in the United States, deploying one of the sport's most recognisable active quarterbacks as narrator, generating credible trade press coverage, and extending a legacy platform in a way that attracted both critical attention and audience participation. Clapboard's score of 68 out of 100 reflects the campaign's genuine creative integrity and cultural timing while acknowledging that the "Is It In You?" territory, however well-executed here, carries the weight of long familiarity.
Gatorade's You Know We Got IT is a 2024 film campaign built around the idea that athletic success is won on the inside. Created by TBWA\Chiat\Day L.A., it uses a locker-room chant to personify inner drive across NFL, NCAA, high school, and flag football, directly extending the brand's revived Is It In You? platform.
Lamar Jackson narrates the You Know We Got IT film. The Baltimore Ravens quarterback leads the voiceover alongside a roster of NFL players including Josh Allen, Myles Garrett, Justin Jefferson, and Puka Nacua, as well as flag-football star Diana Flores, according to reporting by The Drum.
TBWA\Chiat\Day L.A. created the campaign. Copywriter Drew Ruiz wrote the 45-second spot, drawing its rhythmic structure from the clap-and-response cadence of Soulja Boy's Donk, as Ruiz described on his professional site. Director Stuart McIntyre shot the film in Toronto in July 2024, per the same source.
Gatorade launched You Know We Got IT in September 2024, timed to coincide with NFL season kickoff, as reported by The Drum and confirmed by iSpot.tv. The strategic alignment with the season's opening weekend placed the campaign at the centre of the United States' most-watched annual sports moment.
You Know We Got IT is a direct extension of Gatorade's revived Is It In You? platform, which was relaunched earlier in 2024, as reported by The Drum and noted by Marketing Dive. Rather than introducing a new strategic direction, the 2024 film modernises a legacy brand question by translating it into a participatory chant format.
Clapboard rates Gatorade's You Know We Got IT campaign 68 out of 100. The score reflects the film's strong cultural timing, athlete star power, and creative integrity in reviving the Is It In You? platform, balanced against the challenge of refreshing brand territory that carries significant historical familiarity for United States audiences.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
