Liquid I.V. Found Their Fairway: How Data Turned Golf Into a Performance Channel

Most brands assume sports advertising is a game of reach; buy basketball and football, reach millions, win big. But reach without response is just noise. Liquid I.V. wanted more than eyeballs. They wanted to find the audiences most likely to act. So they turned to the data.

Across a full season of sports TV spend, one sport stood out from the field: golf.

The Data Doesn't Lie

When Tatari analyzed Liquid I.V. 's TV sports performance across basketball, football, tennis, and golf, the leaderboard looked nothing like the media plan most brands default to. Basketball commanded the largest budget, delivered the most impressions and garnered the highest raw lift per spot (thanks to Game 2 in the NBA Finals - Go Knicks!), but golf drove the strongest response engagement and lowest CPV at $207.

Moreover, golf generated a 3x stronger response rate than football. And that was not a coincidence. That was by understanding what the data has been telling us all along.

Reading the Greens

Golf viewers don't just watch sports, they over-index for the exact behavior Liquid I.V. is trying to drive. MRI-Simmons data confirmed that golf audiences index 124–134 for sports drink and hydration product usage in the prior 30 days. The person sitting down to watch the U.S. Open or the PGA Championship on CBS is, statistically, already your customer.

The Tatari dashboard made that visible in real time. During the Waste Management Phoenix Open on CBS, a single spot drove site traffic to more than 10x the baseline — 103 unique visitors in minutes against a baseline of 8.6.

The PGA Championship on CBS delivered 349 incremental visitors and 5.36 million impressions, surpassing initial estimates by more than 50%.

NBC US Open, 6/21 - drove their largest golf spike to date!

The Playbook, Not Just the Play

Liquid I.V. came in with a hypothesis that their audience is active, health-conscious, and outdoorsy, so golf felt like a natural fit. Leveraging Tatari's vast experience built on years of data, Tatari helped validate the opportunity and continuously optimize over time.

The data revealed that CBS, NBC, and Golf Channel were the most consistent performers across their sports portfolio. It also helped identify the right creative combinations that drove the strongest responses in golf contexts. And it showed, with precision, which spots were earning their spend and which weren't. The result was a smarter, tighter plan for the next season, one built on proof, not assumptions.

"The biggest wins in media rarely come from following the category playbook,” said Izzy Rusher, Liquid I.V. 's Director of Media.  “They come from understanding your consumer well enough to see opportunities others miss. We believed golf represented an untapped opportunity for Liquid I.V. because of the unique overlap between participation and viewership. Tatari's data helped us validate that hypothesis, optimize our investment, and build a repeatable strategy for the future." 

The success in golf didn't just validate a channel; it validated a methodology. Liquid I.V. is now applying the same data-driven approach to tennis, appearing across all four Grand Slam majors this calendar year. Tennis audiences show similarly strong MRI-Simmons indices for hydration and sports drink usage, and the early measurement signals are consistent with what golf showed in year one.

Two sports that might have seemed like an afterthought behind football and basketball's massive reach are now their two most targeted, efficient channels in the mix. That's what happens when you let measurement guide decisions.

Ready to find your fairway? Tatari's measurement platform shows you which sports, networks, and spots are driving real performance. Let’s talk!