Turning a Launch Day Disaster Into a Multi-Million Euro Revenue Win
The Crisis
Launch day for World Athletics’ new membership platform, Inside Track, was supposed to be a triumph. They’d secured an exclusive interview with Usain Bolt. They’d run paid media campaigns across multiple channels. They’d generated PR buzz.
They got 25 sign-ups.
They’d been expecting 500.
I arrived at World Athletics headquarters to find the team in an emergency meeting with the client, desperately searching for a technical glitch that might explain why nobody was signing up for their heavily-promoted membership launch.
The problem wasn’t technical. It was strategic.
The Problem
Inside Track was launching with a single piece of content: an interview with Usain Bolt, a retired athlete who’d been out of competitive athletics for six years and had given countless interviews since. Worse, the most compelling clips from that interview had already been posted across social media as “teasers” to drive sign-ups.
Athletics fans were being asked to hand over their email address for access to content they’d essentially already seen, from an athlete they’d heard from many times before.
The value proposition was weak. The strategy was backwards. And World Athletics had just spent significant budget promoting something nobody wanted.
The Solution
We had to move fast. Same-day, we created new edits of existing content to start shifting the narrative. Within 72 hours, we had athletes in front of cameras filming fresh content. Within a week, the entire strategy was live.
The strategic pivot centred on three key principles:
1. Access over archives: Instead of one-off interviews, we created ongoing behind-the-scenes access to major events. For the World Championships, Inside Track members went behind the scenes with athletes in ways the general public couldn’t. This wasn’t historical content; this was happening right now, and you couldn’t get it anywhere else.
2. Unexpected connections: We paired legends with current stars: Colin Jackson with Grant Holloway. We asked athletes questions nobody else was asking: Can Mondo Duplantis jump higher than four double-decker buses stacked on top of each other? A giraffe? How many Dragon Ball Z characters can Noah Lyles name during his 45-second personal best sprint time?
Athletics fans didn’t just want race results. They wanted personality. Stories. Human connection.
3. Commercial extension with member benefits: We had a commercial partnership with ASICS to present daily highlights shows during the World Championships. Instead of keeping all that content locked behind the partnership, we extended it: bloopers, extra content, and “deleted scenes” went exclusively to Inside Track members.
We ran member-only competitions: video messages from favourite athletes, online and in-person meet-and-greets, tickets to the World Athletics Awards in Monaco.
We turned Inside Track from a content library into a community with genuine perks.
The Results
The turnaround was immediate. Sign-ups surged. Within six months, World Athletics hit their ambitious first-party data target (measured in the millions).
More importantly: that data became a commercial asset.
With a clear understanding of their audience demographics, engagement patterns, and reach, World Athletics could prove their value to sponsors in ways they’d never been able to before. Within the same period, they signed two major multi-year sponsorship deals with Sony and Honda.
The commercial impact: €51 million in increased revenue, representing a 10.5% growth.
Inside Track (now rebranded as World Athletics Plus) continues to run today, managed by the internal team at World Athletics.
Project duration: 14 months (intensive strategy development, then 3 days per week for ongoing management)
Role: Social Media Consultant via agency, working directly with World Athletics leadership
Scope: Strategic repositioning, content strategy, athlete partnerships, commercial activation, membership growth
