How Oakley and Thinkmodo Made Bubba Watson Ride a Hovercraft Into Golf History
Oakley's 'Bubba's Hover' is a 2013 digital video campaign, created by New York agency Thinkmodo, in which newly signed Oakley spokesperson and professional golfer Bubba Watson rides a fully functional hovercraft golf cart — the BW1 — across grass, sand traps, and water on an Arizona course, demonstrating the vehicle's real-world capabilities in a single unbroken piece of sports entertainment content.
Oakley launched the campaign on April 2, 2013, timing the release to land immediately before the 2013 Masters Tournament. The strategic placement was deliberate: the Masters is the highest-profile event in American golf, and the United States market represented the primary audience Oakley needed to reach as it repositioned itself as a serious golf brand. By anchoring the campaign to the Masters news cycle, Thinkmodo ensured that golf's most attentive audience would encounter Bubba Watson — fresh off signing with Oakley in January 2013 — in the most unexpected context imaginable. The BW1 hovercraft was not a prop or a CGI construct. Developed in partnership with Indiana-based Neoteric Hovercraft, the vehicle floated approximately nine inches above the ground, according to Bloomberg, and operated across the terrain types that define a golf course. Naming the vehicle after Watson's own initials extended the athlete integration beyond a standard endorsement into something closer to a product launch. Thinkmodo's creative directors on the campaign were Michael Krivicka and James Percelay, with Sam Pezzullo and Matthew Cady also credited as part of the production team. The campaign comprised a single media asset — the viral video — distributed through digital channels and seeded into the sports and entertainment press ahead of the Masters week. In the United States, where golf viewership concentrates intensely around the four major tournaments, the timing gave Bubba's Hover its maximum possible cultural surface area. Oakley's objective was clear: establish Watson's personality as an extension of the brand's performance identity, and do so in a way that no competitor could easily replicate or ignore.
Thinkmodo identified a specific strategic gap in Oakley's golf positioning in the United States. Oakley, owned by Luxottica Group following its 2007 acquisition, competed in the performance eyewear category against established golf-focused rivals including Callaway and Nike Golf, both of which maintained athlete rosters built on more conventional endorsement frameworks. The challenge was not simply introducing Bubba Watson as a new Oakley athlete — it was making that introduction feel categorically different from every other golfer-brand pairing in the market.
The consumer insight driving the campaign was straightforward. Watson was not a conventional golfer. His unconventional swing, his public personality, and his status as a fan favourite who had won the 2012 Masters in a sudden-death playoff gave Thinkmodo a creative anchor that most athlete endorsements lack: authenticity to spectacle. Building a real, working hovercraft golf cart — rather than a digitally altered vehicle or a studio construct — was both a production decision and a strategic statement. It told audiences that Oakley backed its athletes with genuine investment, not theatre. In the United States, prescription-sunwear unit sales increased 6.3 percent from 2012 to 2013, according to Vision Monday, indicating a market already in growth. Oakley's move was not simply to claim share in that growth but to define what performance eyewear looked like for a new generation of golf consumers. Watson himself described the BW1 in terms that reinforced the product's utility alongside its spectacle. As he told Bloomberg in April 2013, the craft takes you everywhere you want to go — through sand traps, through water, through shortcuts, into the woods and out of them. That framing, delivered in Watson's own voice, positioned the hovercraft not as a stunt but as a natural extension of how he played golf: creatively and without the constraints that convention imposes. Thinkmodo structured the campaign around that alignment between athlete character and brand promise, using the BW1 as the physical proof point.
Thinkmodo filmed 'Bubba's Hover' in Arizona in January 2013, three months before the campaign's public release. The production timeline reflects the degree of planning required to build and operate a functional hovercraft golf cart on location — an undertaking that demanded coordination between the creative team and Indiana-based Neoteric Hovercraft, the engineering partner responsible for the BW1's design and performance specifications.
Creative directors Michael Krivicka and James Percelay, alongside producer Sam Pezzullo and director of photography Matthew Cady, structured the video around demonstration rather than narrative artifice. The BW1's movement across grass, sand, and water provided the visual content; Watson's presence and commentary provided the character. The production's core discipline was restraint. Rather than constructing an elaborate scenario around the hovercraft, the team allowed the vehicle to perform, with Watson as the natural focal point. As Watson told Adweek in April 2013, the public reaction was immediate: he saw a lot of stares and a lot of laughs. His follow-up observation — that people then saw how efficient it is — identifies the precise emotional arc the video was engineered to deliver: surprise, then credibility. That arc from spectacle to substance is the structural logic of the entire piece. Krivicka and Percelay had established Thinkmodo's reputation for high-concept viral video production in the United States market through earlier campaigns, and 'Bubba's Hover' applied that methodology to sports endorsement for the first time at this scale. The single-asset approach was not a limitation but a concentration of creative intent. One video, one vehicle, one athlete. The absence of supplementary content forced every element of the execution to carry weight, and the production quality — sharp outdoor photography, genuine terrain coverage, and Watson's unscripted delivery — ensured that the asset held up under the volume of views it was about to receive.
The performance data for Oakley's 'Bubba's Hover' campaign is among the most precisely documented for a sports viral video of its era in the United States. The video accumulated 3 million views by April 4, 2013 — just two days after its April 2 launch — according to Forbes. By April 19, 2013, seventeen days after publication, the video had reached 7.6 million YouTube views, as reported by GolfWRX. Those figures place it among the fastest-accumulating sports brand videos of 2013 in the US market.
Audience response extended well beyond passive viewing. Bubba Watson gained 100,000 Twitter followers within three days of the campaign launch, according to Thinkmodo creative director Michael Krivicka. Oakley's main website traffic increased 40 percent following the campaign, again per Krivicka's account. The hovercraft itself generated commercial interest that Oakley converted into a product offering: a limited run of 100 BW1 hovercrafts was announced for sale, turning the viral moment into a tangible revenue channel. The campaign's reach extended into adjacent industries. Mike Glanville, owner of HovPod, described 'Bubba's Hover' to HoverWorld Insider in May 2013 as the hovercraft scoop of the century, adding that the viral effect of the story gave hovercraft in general a boost. That category-level impact — a brand campaign lifting an entire product sector — is a rare outcome and a measure of the execution's scale. No verified awards for 'Bubba's Hover' appear across the Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Webby, or WARC databases. The campaign's legacy rests on its demonstrable audience performance rather than industry recognition. Clapboard rates 'Bubba's Hover' 86 out of 100, reflecting the campaign's strong strategic alignment, authentic production, and verifiable impact across both owned and earned media channels.
Oakley's Bubba's Hover is a 2013 digital video campaign created by Thinkmodo in which professional golfer Bubba Watson rides a real, functional hovercraft golf cart called the BW1. Released on April 2, 2013, ahead of the Masters Tournament, the video reached 7.6 million YouTube views within seventeen days, according to GolfWRX.
Indiana-based Neoteric Hovercraft built the BW1 for the campaign. The vehicle floated approximately nine inches above the ground, according to Bloomberg, and operated across grass, sand, and water. Neoteric Hovercraft served as the engineering production partner alongside creative agency Thinkmodo, which directed the campaign for Oakley.
Michael Krivicka and James Percelay served as creative directors on Bubba's Hover at Thinkmodo. Sam Pezzullo and Matthew Cady were also credited on the production. Krivicka later reported that Oakley's website traffic increased 40 percent following the campaign and that Bubba Watson gained 100,000 Twitter followers within three days of launch.
The Bubba's Hover video reached 3 million views within two days of its April 2, 2013 launch, according to Forbes. By April 19, 2013, the video had accumulated 7.6 million YouTube views, as reported by GolfWRX, making it one of the fastest-growing sports brand videos in the United States market that year.
Oakley timed the April 2, 2013 release to coincide with peak golf viewership in the United States ahead of the Masters. The Masters is American golf's highest-profile event, and launching then ensured Bubba Watson — signed to Oakley in January 2013 — reached the most attentive golf audience possible at a single moment.
No verified awards for Bubba's Hover appear across the Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Webby, or WARC databases. Despite the absence of formal industry recognition, the campaign's documented results — including 7.6 million YouTube views and a 40 percent increase in Oakley website traffic per Thinkmodo — affirm its effectiveness. Clapboard rates it 86 out of 100.
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