Trusted by more than 2,000 professional and collegiate teams, Honey Stinger has built the credibility and authenticity to fuel hundreds of thousands of additional athletes, everyday consumers, and active enthusiasts. The next objective: grow share even further among active enthusiasts to support rapidly expanding distribution and velocities.
To do so, Honey Stinger set out to deliver its largest tentpole campaign to date in a way that felt premium and credible while maintaining the accountability and precision required to drive measurable business impact.
In 2025, Honey Stinger activated its network of athletes and teams through a partnership with Ohio State players, creating authentic college football content that brought the brand’s performance credibility to life.
The challenge: showing up in college football typically requires working through legacy media gatekeepers and committing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to large linear TV buys. While this approach delivers broad reach, it offers limited control and makes it difficult to align media investment with the specific consumers and retail markets most likely to drive business outcomes.
Honey Stinger needed a meaningful game-day presence and consistent visibility throughout the season, while remaining accountable to measurable indicators of growing consumer demand, including increases in brand awareness and branded search activity.
Instead of committing budget to an untargeted local linear TV buy across select markets, we built a plan that repeatedly placed Honey Stinger in the right game contexts while reaching the most qualified Active Enthusiasts throughout the season.
Grain Group approached the campaign through our Impact Planning framework, which connects media investment directly to business outcomes by aligning audience targeting, media environments, and geographic coverage with where the brand can actually convert demand.
The core strategic shift was redefining how Honey Stinger showed up in College Football. Instead of treating the sport as a single high-cost tentpole moment, we built a Live Game Buying System, transforming College Football into a disciplined, repeatable media investment strategy anchored in live game environments that index strongly against Active Enthusiasts.
Programmatic Connected TV became the engine of the campaign. Rather than committing the majority of budget to one expensive linear buy, we designed a CTV-first live sports strategy that captured as many live game windows as possible while maintaining strict control over inventory quality, audience reach, and geographic delivery.
To scale the Live Game Buying System, we partnered with SSPs, including Magnite and PubMatic, to build curated CTV deal paths prioritizing live sports inventory. We negotiated conference-specific supply across Big Ten and SEC games, aligning media exposure not only with the Ohio State NIL creative but also with priority markets where Honey Stinger had strong retail distribution and ecommerce demand.
This approach concentrated premium game inventory against the highest-value consumers and geographies, ensuring exposure aligned with where incremental demand could translate into real sales.
Execution required strict discipline. We applied tight dayparting around kickoff and live game windows, aggressive bidding during those moments, and strict inventory controls to ensure delivery remained anchored in live sports environments rather than diluted run-of-network supply.
Linear TV was used selectively for a small set of marquee games that could add reach without weakening the live game strategy.
With the CTV foundation in place, additional channels extended coverage and repetition throughout the season. YouTube extended the video story between games through custom College Football inclusion lists. Meta and TikTok amplified the content in native feeds, while CTV viewer display retargeting re-engaged exposed households after game windows. A Big Ten Network social sponsorship reinforced the same credibility story fans were seeing on the big screen.
Across every layer, investment remained focused on Active Enthusiasts in priority markets with strong retail and ecommerce availability, ensuring media exposure translated into measurable business impact.
The campaign proved that Honey Stinger could activate in premium College Football environments while maintaining greater efficiency, precision, and accountability to demand signals.
CTV delivery remained tightly anchored to live sports environments. Eighty-five percent of impressions ran during live games, with the remainder limited to closely related pre-game and post-game programming.
Live game placements included top-ranked matchups such as Ohio State vs. Illinois, Indiana vs. Oregon, Wisconsin vs. Indiana, Florida vs. Ole Miss, and Texas A&M vs. South Carolina.
Across the season, the campaign delivered 80 million impressions and reached approximately 12 million Active Enthusiasts at meaningful frequency, nearly 3× the targeted reach a traditional linear TV buy would have delivered.
Efficiency improved through continuous optimization. The campaign achieved a blended CPM 18% better than benchmark, allowing Honey Stinger to capture more live game inventory and maintain a premium presence across the full season.
Most importantly, the campaign translated media exposure into measurable signals of brand demand.
Platform lift studies showed the campaign drove a 5–10% increase in brand awareness, while branded search volume increased across Amazon, Google, and Walmart.com during the College Football window.
By aligning premium sports media with audience precision, geographic prioritization, and measurable demand signals, the campaign demonstrated that College Football can deliver both brand impact and accountable business outcomes.
