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 sweet 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.
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? With a surprise song drop.
To craft our song, we teamed up with rapper, TikTok star, and all-around sweet 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 song for a product—without making it sound like a cringey 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. The resulting song is an earworm from the first play. And since this partnership was with a musician with such a devoted fan base, we treated this as a traditional song drop, with a social-first twist.
We dropped “Strawberries & Creamin’” with a video from Yung Gravy in a TikTok TopView takeover and added the song to his official TikTok music library, making Yung Gravy and Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream the first thing everyone saw when they opened the app on May 3.
On YouTube, we dropped the full track and an animated music video featuring Yung Gravy dancing with an anthropomorphized Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream can—yes, you read that correctly. We also teamed up with NTWRK to drop exclusive Yung Gravy x Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream merch for any fans that wanted to celebrate the release with some threads or novelty items.
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. With over 3M streams on Spotify to date, it’s clear that the song passed the vibe check. It became a crisp and clean hit for Yung Gravy and Dr Pepper fans alike.
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 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 did love 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 with Yung Gravy helped contribute to some great brand lift metrics across TikTok for Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream: +24.1% in ad recall for Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream ads, +11.3% in brand awareness around Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream, and +8.9% in brand association of Dr Pepper with Strawberries & Cream.
