After years of hiring famous rappers to push Sprite’s message of Obey Your Thirst, the brand was losing relevance with its core base which had shifted from devoted consumers to driven creators and arbiters of Hip Hop culture.

These creators don’t want to be sold to, they want to be worked with. Sprite’s audience had changed, so we needed to change too. That’s why we created Sprite Way: a new way for Sprite to engage with our community.

THE UNFOLLOW POST

To announce this new way, we had to do something dramatic. For a brand on social, that meant unfollowing the standard corporate sponsors and unconcerned celebrity endorsers, and following creators and fans from our community that really support the brand. All they had to do was tell us why we should follow them. This video garnered over 100K organic views across Instagram and Twitter and racked up over 7K comments.

But this was only the beginning.

THE CTA

The first big action for Sprite Way came through a hacked brief for the GRAMMYs. Our Sprite client wanted us to use this tentpole moment as a way to engage our audience, however, through analytics and listening, we knew that our audience doesn’t feel represented by big award shows like the GRAMMYs, or even feel like they recognize their favorite musicians.

So in response to this brief, we dropped another simple CTA asking our audience who they were listening to and aligned it with the award show broadcast. The post was met with an overwhelming response including 20k responses and over 10k unique artist nominations across Instagram and Twitter.

THE PLAYLIST

The point of this behavioral shift was to move from talking to, to working with. So we created the first major community generated playlist on Spotify with 20 artists from our CTA. For these select artists from our community, it helps attack the barriers of awareness and exposure that we know creators and arbiters in our audience face. To date, the playlist has racked up almost 4,000 followers and made a substantial impact on on the followings of our Sprite Way artists.

THE STAGE

We know another barrier for creators in our audience is access to the places that showcase their talent. So if Spotify was their “URL” stage, then we needed to put them on IRL stages too. We used our existing partnership with the BET Awards and later created a partnership with A3C Fader Fort to provide these artists with the stages that they needed to reach the next level in their career.

THE BOOST THEY NEED

There are a lot of ways to prove success for this campaign. For Sprite, it looks like 245K new followers, 130M engagements, 90% positive sentiment, and the highest ROI that the Coca-Cola Company has ever seen. But the real results were for our artists. Our combined Sprite Way roster saw an increase of 212K new social followers and 156K new Spotify listeners; a 27% and 38.5% increase respectively. But this boost goes beyond the numbers. Some of our artists have signed record deal contracts, and we’ve been able to use our media partners to continually elevate our artists

THE SPRITE WAY

With this campaign, we created a new way. We acted selflessly and decided to serve the community. We let our community drive our brand to show them what they wanted to see in their newsfeed. This allowed us to use our brand power and resources to break down barriers for creators in our community. Barriers of exposure, credibility, connections, and resources. And the crazy thing is, it worked. Thanks to Sprite Way, Sprite is leading the entire Coca-Cola portfolio in ROI. It even helped inspire the brand’s behavior of “Put You On” and got real creators in our commercials. But these real posts from a couple of our Sprite Way artists really sums it all up.

VIEW THE VIDEO CASE STUDY