Dr Pepper, the oldest major soft drink in America, has been a one-of-a-kind brand since its inception in 1885. We’re still one of a kind on all accounts: flavor profiles, brand values, and, most importantly, fandom. Now, in 2023, we had big news to share.

We invented a brand-new flavor: Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream. Our goal was to introduce this new smooth and creamy flavor to the world and capture the attention of flavor lovers everywhere. In a world obsessed with the newest new thing, in a category overflowing with new flavors…grabbing attention is far from easy.

To craft our song, we teamed up with rapper, TikTok star, and all-around smooth and creamy guy Yung Gravy. His catchy tracks and cheeky tone made him the perfect collab to grab the attention of soda fans. Together with Yung Gravy and his team, we created “Strawberries & Creamin’,” a song all about enjoying new Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream.

Making a legitimately good song for a product is always a challenge. But on “Strawberries & Creamin’” Yung Gravy seamlessly wove challenging product language into a sleek production while maintaining his signature wink.

Our target audience was GenZennial drinkers—which we have coined as “Flavor Cravers.” They’re flavor-focused and taste-motivated.

In order to make Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream the hottest drop of the year, we knew we needed to go big. What’s the biggest way to make a splash in culture? A surprise song drop on the platform where musicians begin the promotion of new music and where our target audience likes to spend their time—TikTok. We made sure that content supporting the song drop felt authentic to Yung Gravy as we utilized his channels to help promote the collaboration and launch of the flavor.

Together with producer Diamond Pistols, Gravy employed clever production techniques, like sampling the **crack** of a Dr Pepper can being opened, and even interpolating one of his most popular songs, “Mr. Clean,” as a clever Easter egg for his fans.

We dropped “Strawberries & Creamin’” with a video from Yung Gravy in a TikTok TopView takeover, making Yung Gravy and Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream the first thing everyone saw when they opened the app on May 3.

Then we dropped the full track on YouTube, with a music video featuring an animated Yung Gravy.

The song performed so well during its release that Yung Gravy’s label deemed it worthy of a single, releasing it on Spotify and all streaming platforms.

We also teamed up with NTWRK to drop exclusive Yung Gravy x Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream merch for fans that wanted to embrace the Strawberries & Cream hype.

From our TopView takeover on 5/3, we saw 31MM impressions on content that led to a 4.33% engagement rate—beating benchmarks from all TopView videos in Q1 of 2023. After our takeover date, the videos continued to run with paid support and saw 66M total views, 904.2K likes, 45.6K shares, and 13.1K comments mentioning how much they loved the product, the partnership, and the song itself.

And they really loved it. We saw over 3K users create videos with the song, over 250K views on the lyric video on YouTube, 3.1M song streams on Spotify, and over 4K entries for exclusive Yung Gravy x Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream merch on NTWRK.

Content surrounding the partnership helped contribute to some great brand lift metrics across TikTok for Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream: +24.1% in ad recall, +11.3% in brand awareness, and +8.9% in brand association.