Sprite needed to inject new life into their brand, continue to build credibility with their youth audiences, and reinforce their significant place in those cultures. Our approach was to do this honestly and directly by acknowledging those cultures, showing up in their communities, participating in their visual conversation, and staying true to Sprite's intrinisic product characteristics.

All of these brand campaigns adopt the “cut and paste” visual strategy that emerged as the key attribute of their audience. We developed a stylistically diverse palette of visual expressions that translated Sprite's flavor profile, its brand values, and its cultural affinities, delivered as a customizable pastiche of visual messaging.

Youth culture is not a monolith, so this broad strategy was applied to multiple campaigns, each with specific visual approaches developed for the different audiences, geographies, priorities, and degrees of familiarity with Sprite.

While each campaign serves different audiences, the core visual elements and techniques recur in varying degrees across all campaigns, with some campaigns maintaining unique, specific approaches. Taken as a whole they speak to both the diversity and similarities of the different audiences with a varied, idiosyncratic, but cohesive voice, engaging with Sprite's communities without trying to emulate them.

Effervescence

This campaign focuses squarely on the intrisic qualities of Sprite—bubbles, lemon-lime, and refreshment. A visual translation of what Sprite tastes and feels like, with a dynamic but relaxed energy, rendered through the filter of our youth-culture based visual strategy.

This campaign is the core expression of the product itself, speaking to culture through style, not narrative content, and is intended for broad applications across all markets.

Mix and Match

The expression of this campaign is grounded by a consistent bottom half using Sprite's core brand elements—color, logo, tag line, and dimple bottle—combined with a matter-of-fact expression slammed across the top-half that speaks directly to product and culture. The top half is executed differently every time with the recurring campaign visual elements, or taken over by local designers and artists to speak more directly to their audience, or ideally both. In this way culture and "corporate" brand coexist without compromising the integrity of either.

This campaign's strength increases in multiple media placements so it works most effectively in larger budget markets.

Icons and Legends

An homage to Sprite's audience and the influences that connect and define their social groups and sub-cultures—where personal and community narratives are defined by a collection of associations, sources, and references, often contradictory and inexplicable. This campaign acknowledges that.

This is less about product characteristics and more about Sprite's priority of meeting its audience—in this case a mostly suburban audience—where they are culturally. This functions best as "branded art" interventions where those communites meet.

Camouflage

As a reflection of youth culture's embrace of pattern (at the time), and more specifically the military camouflage pattern, this campaign uses a limited collection of core visual assets to create a family of expressions, variously emphasizing product, lifestyle, or both, along with a camouflage version of all of the patterns, easily scaleable to be as overt or subtle as desired.

Operating just under the mainstream cultural radar, this city-centric enigmatic "in-the-know" campaign is meant to exist in places for and by the culture it represents.

D.I.Y.

Replacing the “Camouflage” campaign two years later, this campaign reflects the emerging DIY aesthetic (at the time) of some of the more leading-edge subcultures that Sprite counts amoung its audiences. Rather than emulating that aesthetic, Sprite joins the conversation by offering a symmetric Rorschach-like kit-of-parts using brand, product, and cultural vocabulary from which audience narratives, not corporate narratives, can be construed.

Like the “Camouflage” campaign before it, this city-centric enigmatic campaign is designed to exist in places for and by the youth culture it represents.

Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Brand Integration Group (BIG), New York
Executive Creative Director: Brian Collins
Creative Director: Weston Bingham
Design Director: Iwona Waluk
Designers: Weston Bingham, Maja Blazejewska, Sam Farfsing, Jasper Goodall, David Harlan , Satian Pengsathapon, Jason Ring, Iwona Waluk
Strategists: Judd Harner, Laurie Cohen
Client Lead: David Butler (Coca-Cola)