Aspercreme, a topical pain relief brand for arthritic 55+ year-olds, would be the last brand you’d expect to jump headfirst into culture. But as the #7 pain relief brand maneuvering for more market share – and competing against brands with far greater fame and budgets like Tylenol, Icy Hot, and Biofreeze – playing it safe wasn’t an option.
Aspercreme faces the same perception challenge as our 55+ audience: We’re overlooked, but we’re a lot more interesting than people give us credit for. To get people to rethink the brand, we need people to rethink ageist stereotypes. Usually, this audience is depicted with gray hairs and playing pickleball, but their reality is much more dynamic. They’re more interesting, like 55-year-old DJ Mad Marj spinning Cardi B and 54-year-old curler Rich Ruohonen becoming the oldest American to compete in the Winter Olympics.
This led to our foundational insight: Age makes you interesting – it’s the pain that makes you dull. In our new platform, “Act Your Age,” Aspercreme defies pain’s power, so you can defy aging’s stereotypes.
With a very limited budget, we needed to find opportunities in culture to generate outsized brand attention without relying on heavy paid media investment. We set out to identify buzzworthy moments where older people were doing interesting, inspiring, and unexpected things, pain be damned.
Older adults are routinely sidelined in culture, especially when it comes to sports. This is exclusively the case in American college football, an enormous $14 billion industry built around the best 18- to 22-year-old players in the country. They aren’t quite professionals yet, but they are treated like them. NIL deals allow college athletes to earn money from their personal brand, and fans can’t get enough of it.
Enter, the perfect partner: 58-year-old college freshman Tom Cillo. Yes, you read that right. Not only did Cillo go back to school at 58, but he also joined the football team, facing off against players three decades younger than him. And he did it at the toughest, most painful position possible: defensive line.
Within five minutes of spotting the opportunity and a quick text to the client, we were in motion. Just a couple of days later, Aspercreme signed Tom to a historic NIL sponsorship deal, making him the oldest ever player to receive one. In our launch video, Tom shared a powerful, defiant voiceover – “You lose something when you age: the ability to give a damn what anyone else thinks” – an unexpected tone that fans immediately latched onto. Not only was Tom facing incredibly physical, painful challenges in his football journey, but he also personified our brand’s ethos, proving that you can defy aging’s stereotypes when you defy pain’s power. So this partnership birthed a simple mantra: “58 Years. 0 Quit.”
But that was just the first quarter. Then we made Tom the face of our brand for the entire football season, showing how we could relieve his aches and pains on the field, while also working with him to inspire fans all over the world who wanted to push themselves to new heights in their own lives. We executed a fully integrated campaign to keep the earned pickup coming. Billboards, full-page print ads, custom product, pregame outfits, social content – giving Tom the same treatment any superstar athlete would get in a brand campaign, and proving to fans that it’s never too late to follow your dreams. By quickly taking action, we fit so naturally into Tom’s story that you couldn’t tell it without mentioning Aspercreme – from podcasts, to national news articles, to live tapings of Sunday morning TV shows.
Despite both Tom and Aspercreme being underdogs in the college football world, they ended the season on top of it.
With news coverage during every month of football season, the campaign achieved an estimated $12M in earned media value – more than Aspercreme’s entire annual budget. For a brand that needed to punch above its weight, the partnership achieved an astounding 1,163% return on investment and 1.13B earned impressions. Critics raved, with the Associated Press hailing Tom as “A perfect brand ambassador” and The New York Times calling it “The most clever NIL deal of the season” – the first time the Times has covered Aspercreme in over 40 years.
Our partnership became the most talked-about endorsement deal of the season, besting sports heavyweights like Nike, Adidas, Gatorade, Bose, and more. Social conversation grew 297%, inspiring others to chase their dreams. Fans shared comments like “There’s hope even for old guys like me,” “I’m 61, this cat is inspirational,” and “as a fellow 58-year-old, keep crushing it, bro 💪”. But the impact wasn’t just online; it was on the shelf: Sales spiked by 11.5% the week following the announcement of our partnership.
