In 2015, Sprite opened "The Corner" in the Bowery in lower Manhattan. It was created in the spirit of neighborhood grocery stores in New York—serving not only as a store, but as a community crossroads where knowledge was dropped. The visuals of the Corner needed to blend the sensibilities of the community with Sprite's lemon and lime brand identity. We needed visuals that would feel at home in the neighborhood, and also embrace the visual culture of New York bodegas. The results made The Corner feel like it belonged on the Bowery, expressing an energy and sense of welcome to the kids of New York. When they walked into The Corner, they were surrounded by reimagined everyday bodega products—but with a hip hop attitude. First impressions are everything, and the design did a good job of setting the tone for the space.

On July 16th, Vince Staples, fresh off of a major album release, launched The Corner with a performance and live Q&A, put on by Mass Appeal. Concert clips, GIFs, and stills were distributed via hip-hop PR and Mass Appeal’s media network, posted to Sprite’s Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook channels, and broadcast from Sprite’s Snapchat in real-time. The Q&A was distributed in full and chopped into digestible sound bites. All content was aggregated on a custom Sprite Tumblr, which encouraged teens to view, remix, and share whatever spoke to them.

This was repeated for each of the 14 events. Partners created content that was native to their platforms and distributed it accordingly. Sprite took ownership of the content and creative process on their social channels. As a result teens were able to take in Sprite’s message in a way that felt natural to how they take in content.

3 million engagements and 145 million impressions with our content in social media alone. Increase in brand favorability and lift in sales (but we haven't been told how much yet).

Facebook Brand affect: On Facebook there was a 5% Increase in message association against 18-24 demo and 8% increase in message association against Males

Our Twitter engagement rate was over 4x higher than twitter’s benchmark (5.22% vs. 1.5%)

Overall, social followers increased by 2.5%