Sprite L.A.Bron Can

The Sprite team briefed us to celebrate our #1 asset for Sprite, LeBron James, starting the next chapter of his career with the Los Angeles Lakers. The problem is that we’re limited to the assets we use that involve LeBron’s likeness. We couldn’t use old assets from LeBron commercials past, or anything with him actually on the court. So that forced us to get creative.

SPRITE GOES PURPLE AND GOLD

Everyone knows Sprite for their iconic green and yellow brand. So what better way to tip our hat to LeBron being a Laker than by subbing out Sprite’s iconic green for Laker’s purple. For one day only, Sprite went from green and yellow, to purple and yellow. We changed everything that our social audience would see: profile photos, header images, social content, and the cherry on top, the Sprite can itself.

We knew that once we posted this can on our social channels that our audience would go crazy; and that’s exactly what happened. In a matter of hours we had thousands of comments asking for the can and cheering on LeBron.

For our full rollout, we created purple and gold animations to celebrate small moments during the game like his first point, first dunk, etc. We even worked with the OOH agency to create billboards that would go live in L.A. around the Staples Center the day of the game.

Unfortunately, we never got to roll either of these things out. A few hours after our first posts went live, we got a Cease & Desist letter from the NBA threatening legal action. So we had to pull everything purple and gold from our feeds. But the activation remains in the folklore of Sprite history forever.

Role: Creative Lead, Art Director