How do you describe Dr Pepper’s brand new flavor? You don’t.
That’s the philosophy behind the launch of Red Fusion, the soda company’s first flavor extension in its 117-year history. Devised by Jeff Maerov, associate creative director/ copywriter, and Jordan Atlas, associate creative director/art director, at Young & Rubicam, New York, the "Who’s Your Soda" campaign relies on mystery, not description, to reach its youthful demographic. "Dr Pepper itself has always been a flavor you couldn’t define," observes Atlas. "It was a natural place for the new product to go. We didn’t really want to talk about how it tastes. Even its name, Red Fusion, doesn’t talk about the flavor. It has that mystery built into it."
"When they did focus groups, everyone they asked had a different answer about what the taste was," adds Maerov. "Since everyone had their own interpretation, labeling the taste would have been the wrong thing to do. We wanted to let the target audience try it and decide for themselves."
Instead of describing, as Maerov puts it, "that unique, original, one-of-a-kind taste," the Y&R team opted for a more laid-back approach with four :15s—"Sweatin’," "Straw Wars," "Last Drop" and "Taste Buds." Directed by Kevin Smith of Backyard Productions, Venice, Calif., the spots depict real-looking teens and twentysomethings enjoying Red Fusion, as a voiceover extols the product with inventive metaphors. "[The client] was trying to tap into more of an urban market—a market that Dr Pepper and Diet Dr Pepper didn’t have," says Jim Ferguson, president/chief creative officer at Y&R, and executive creative director on the campaign. "They tested a lot of [flavors], and this one taste-tested really well. It’s a taste that’s difficult to describe—it’s not a cherry flavor, it’s something else. But people really took to it."
The desire for that hard-to-describe flavor is evident in the spots. For example, in "Last Drop," a young man holds an empty can of Red Fusion over his mouth as the voiceover compares its desirability to that of "oxygen on Mars." "Taste Buds" shows a guy polishing off an entire bottle in one gulp, with the VO discussing the two types of taste buds: "the yes-men" at the front of the tongue, and the Red Fusion-loving "boys in the back who get all the glory." In "Straw Wars," two friends use their straws to fight over a spilled drop of the soda, as the voiceover speaks from the soda’s point of view, comparing himself to a suspect on "one of those cop shows, running around with your shirt off and people chasing you." "Sweatin" features close-ups of other sodas, as the voiceover explains, "that isn’t condensation, that’s sweat."
"The tagline, ‘Who’s Your Soda,’ isn’t so much a question as a statement," Atlas points out. "It’s not really telling you what to do, it’s telling you what you should know."
Maerov says he tried to "go as far out there" as he could with the voiceover copy. "We wanted to use terms that no one else speaks about a product in," he explains. "We wanted to give it an attitude."
Glossy images of supermodels drinking the soda would’ve been all wrong for the 12-to-24-year-old target audience. "They’re sharper than most targets," relates Atlas. "They’re looking for the hard sell, and they’re suspicious of advertisers telling them what to do. We wanted to hold a mirror toward them. The casting, the wardrobe, the intimate camera angle, we tried to make it all look real. We wanted to say, ‘This is a cool product. You should be drinking it, but we’re not going to tell you to.’ "
"This whole campaign was about attitude, and Jeff and Jordan are absolutely terrific about tapping into a great, hip attitude," notes Ferguson. "They’re not the hippest looking guys you’ve ever seen, but they know hip. They have a good feel for what’s going on out there.
good direction
Though they spoke to several directors, the Y&R team thought Smith was perfect for the job. "We’ve always loved the stuff he’s done," Maerov says. "He brings something that is rare, as far as making it intriguing to look at.
"If you were to just shoot the storyboard, it wouldn’t necessarily be that interesting," he continues. "It would just be a drop on the table, or a kid drinking the bottle of soda. It’s what you do with it. Kevin’s also great to work with—he’s very team-oriented."
Y&R producer Mootsy Elliot agrees with that assessment of Smith. "He was wonderful," says Elliot, who adds that many directors were interested in the job because the creatives "were very clear in their vision and stayed true to it. We had very little money for this. We had to ask people to cut their costs, but everybody was willing to, because of the idea. Everybody saw it as being interesting."
Elliot had initially planned on a much more involved postproduction phase. "I was prepared to do a lot of the stuff with CGI," she remembers. "But Kevin said, ‘No. I really want to shoot as much as we can, and rely very little on computer graphics.’ He was right. We did a little enhancement here and there, but he really did all of it." (Guava, the visual effects boutique launched by New York post facility Nice Shoes earlier this year, contributed to the look of the drops of soda and the end tag treatment.)
Good casting was essential to the spots’ success. "We wanted to show people who weren’t so ‘modelly,’" Maerov says. "We didn’t want these precious, perfect people. We wanted kids who looked real, and sort of cool. And we didn’t want twenty-five-year-olds cast as eighteen-year-olds."
"We had one casting session that was too middle-of-the-road," Elliot recalls. "We ended up saying ‘No, no,’ to that, then we took a left turn and got some really interesting people."
Like Joe McKay, the actor who appeared in "Taste Buds," and could polish off a bottle of Red Fusion in one gulp. "That was an extra skill requirement," Maerov laughs. "But in addition to his chugging ability, we loved his look and his attitude."
Smith and the creatives put that chugging ability to the test. "We did the take about seventeen or eighteen times," Atlas reports, though Elliot adds, "he had a little help from a tube that ran down his arm and into the bottle. He was drinking some of the bottle, while some of it was exported. Still, he probably drank the equivalent of six bottles worth."
Like the front-of-the-camera talent, the voiceover, done by Shawn Michael Howard, had to have the right attitude. "At first, there was a faction [at Y&R] that wanted a Timothy Leary-style voice-over, but we didn’t feel that was right for this market," says Elliot. "We listened to some, but that clearly wasn’t the way to go. We wanted someone who sounded real, and sort of urban. We cast the voiceover in New York, Chicago and L.A., and wound up choosing someone from L.A."
The spots were shot in Los Angeles. "We shot them, not in these perfectly pristine places," notes Atlas, "but in real markets, places like Echo Park, different areas of the city that are not squeaky clean, but real places where kids hang out."
The creatives were pleased with the results. "We worked closely with Kevin to develop a look that felt like these people would be doing this whether they were in front of the camera or not," observes Atlas, who is currently working, with Maerov, on a Diet Dr Pepper campaign directed by Jim Jenkins of bicoastal/ international hungry man. "I think we succeeded in that."
As for follow-up spots, he says, "that remains to be seen. So far, [the campaign] has been received really well."b
