Bubba's jetpack - Oakley | Clapboard Ad Archive
Bubba’s Jetpack marks a genre-defining moment for Oakley in Year 2016, deploying the cult celebrity power of professional golfer Bubba Watson to reimagine the intersection of fashion, sport, and emerging technology within the highly competitive apparel landscape. Conceived and executed by Thinkmodo, the campaign’s digital core is the reveal of the BW-Air — billed as the world’s first golf cart jetpack — an audacious engineering feat that fuses Oakley’s ethos of innovation with the kinetic energy and personality of Watson himself. What Clapboard’s taxonomy would classify as FORMAT#8—Ongoing Characters or Celebrities, the work harnesses Watson’s recognisable persona to spark fascination, leveraging celebrity-driven narrative as its central creative device rather than traditional storytelling, challenge, or comparative formats. By positioning Watson not only as the protagonist but as a direct collaborator—a project by Bubba Watson and Oakley—the campaign mobilises authenticity and personality, capturing the aspirational lifestyle at Oakley’s core while signaling technical forwardness that resonates deeply with a digitally literate and adventure-driven audience. The visual storytelling is crafted for viral reach, propelling the concept to over 1.2 million views and generating robust consumer engagement through a dynamic single media asset, all set to an energetic track sourced from Audio Network, which underscores the sense of possibility and velocity at the heart of the campaign’s visual language. Oakley’s strategy here is pointed: build awareness and reinforce category leadership not through overt claims or didactic messaging, but by letting the spectacle of Bubba and his jetpack dominate the conversation both within and far beyond the golf world. The campaign’s playful embrace of hybrid sport-tech fantasy amplifies brand recall and cements Oakley’s status among consumers who value both performance and style, deftly navigating the expectations of a millennial and Gen Z audience accustomed to boundary-pushing content. In a market often saturated by technical jargon or incremental product launches, Bubba’s Jetpack commands attention by upending category convention and catalyzing earned media, social sharing, and lively debate—all core outcomes for fashion and lifestyle brands looking to elevate relevance and salience. Clapboard rates this 73/100. Bubba’s Jetpack matters because it demonstrates how deploying celebrity partnership as a creative engine achieves brand breakthrough in sectors where innovation must be felt as much as seen.
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