Propel Venture Partners

How Propel Keeps Its Brand Motivated In A Modern Marketing Landscape

Propel, PepsiCo’s fitness water brand, is steering its digital messaging to reach consumers during workouts by prioritizing music and mobile. The brand has cultivated deep ties with Pandora and Under Armour’s Map My Fitness app, using stations and experiences to engage fitness instructors, gym owners, and athletes through Co:Labs events. Propel’s leadership, notably brand director Laura Barnett, emphasizes uniting fitness tribes and culture while building first-party data assets to improve one-to-one communication and deliver tailored content via a CRM. The company collaborates with agencies including VML and OMD to manage its programmatic and cross-agency coordination. Propel also ran an awards challenge on Map My Fitness offering gifts for milestone miles or calories burned. The overall strategy highlights leveraging first-party data and partnerships to optimize loyalty, content, experiences, and media ROI in a cost-constrained environment for consumer packaged goods.

Pandora Focuses On Its Visual Ad Products

Pandora is shifting its focus toward visual advertising, expanding beyond audio with features like Sponsored Listening (launched last year), where brands sponsor an hour of ad-free music and viewers opt in by watching a 15-second video ad for a flat rate. Brands such as Gatorade, Propel, and Taco Bell have experimented with this format. Pandora reports engagement metrics from its Sponsored Listening campaigns: 59% of listeners who make it past the first 15 seconds watch a full 30-second video, and 37% watch a full 60 seconds, based on a survey of 208 campaigns. The company is also testing muted autoplay video and targeting based on listening preferences, while noting a high pre-roll skip rate of 90% and drawing parallels to muted video success seen by Facebook. Pandora emphasises user control and notes billions of daily interaction data points within its app.