China is Sprite’s largest market globally. Sprite is one of China’s biggest sparkling drinks after Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Sprite has been in China for almost 40 years.

To grow Sprite needs to constantly get noticed, and chosen by Gen Z youth, as they are the biggest consumers of sparkling beverages in China.

But getting noticed is not easy given that the entire beverage category invests in everything from IP’s, celebrities, passion points and even crossover products to get the attention of Gen Z in China. Traditional advertising campaigns have become table stakes.

As a 40-year-old brand, In China Sprite needs to constantly find innovative and cut-through ways to get noticed or risk becoming irrelevant amongst Gen Z youth, in its largest market globally.

In 2023, Gen Z across China were joking about the ‘1982 Sprite’ more than ever before.

WE TOOK THE JOKE TO THE NEXT LEVEL BY TURNING THE ‘1982 SPRITE’ MEME INTO AN ACTUAL PRODUCT – A LIMITED EDITION 1982 SPRITE VARIANT.

We created a 1982 Sprite for real. Complete with a separate flavour and packaging to tap into the popularity of the meme. The label for the limited-edition bottle was inspired by the no-frills version in the actual meme. The product itself had an enhanced lime ‘bouquet’ that set it apart from regular Sprite.

The entire launch campaign of ‘1982 Sprite’ was a parody of established codes of luxury and excess of the wine category, that included a live auction on Douyin (TikTok), an immersive tasting experience at ‘Chateau Sprite’ in retail and even refreshing the classic meme with the real ‘1982 Sprite’ on World Emoji Day.

Our demographic - Gen Z (19% of the total population) 93% of whom were heavy beverage consumers was our ‘must-win’ audience.

They accounted for over 50% of all sparkling beverages consumed in China. As heavy beverage consumers, they choose to drink a non-alcoholic beverage at least once a week. Amongst non-alcoholic beverages, their top choice was sparkling making them critical for Sprite.

Our approach – Our campaign was primarily made-for-social. We activated on platforms where memes were shared most often by Gen Z, namely Douyin (Tik-Tok), Weibo and WeChat.

To increase engagement, we used our proprietary audience planning methodology in partnership with Douyin, to identify users who had engaged with the ‘1982 Sprite’ meme in the past 90 days and serve them the auction livestream.

We launched a tongue-in-cheek, social video introducing the ‘1982 Sprite’ from a ‘winery’ to spark conversations on social media.

This built up to the main event – A live auction on Douyin(Tik-Tok) of the ‘1982 Sprite’

Celebrity, David (Yaoqing) Wang famous for playing suave and sophisticated characters hosted the auction. The livestream event featured various lifestyle influencer sharing their food pairings and signature tips on how to properly ‘savour’ the 1982 Sprite.

We opened the ‘Sprite Chateaus’ in over 100 K retail locations for ‘connoisseurs’ to enjoy an immersive tasting experience. Select locaitons even feautred a sommilier and musicnas to add to the expereince (and absurditiy)

As a finale, we refreshed the original ‘1982 Sprite’ meme on world emoji day, with an updated version featuring the limited-edition product.

The campaign generated impressive results, including:

- 250 million earned impressions

- 2 billion total impressions

- 9.9 million total engagements

- 5.1 million live auction views

- No.1 Douyin store sales

- Bids topping 70x retail price