Dr Pepper's $36 billion jingle is putting CMOs out of a job, plus all the latest brand news

Issue #82

Weekly Exhale

“Dr Pepper baaaayyyybeee...it’s good...and nice.” Then comes the part that lights your heart up: “Doo-doo-doooh”.

Romeo Bingham sits in the driver’s seat of a beaten-up Subaru, phone sellotaped to the windscreen as she scats out a lyric for the Dr Pepper brand.

The words are easy, positive, slightly goofy and a perfect send-up to strategists who over-think these things.

The melody hails from church, part jingle, part gospel classic. The phrasing is innate. A short, unassuming hook at first. Then it starts to echo in your head. And every time it plays, your mood lifts ever so gently.

No, Romeo is not a singer, nor a musician, nor a marketing person. She’s not even an influencer. She’s a caregiver from Tacoma, Washington, 25 years old, self-described as “usually silly”. Her smile carries wildly imperfect teeth with a magnetism you can’t ignore.

When I first looked at it, the video was already at 60 million+ views. A couple of days later, 118 million. 11.4m likes, 1m saves. And it’s still climbing.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Warhol. Romeo enjoying her 15 megabytes of fame. But it’s a little more than that. With the duets, stitches, remixes, hot takes, brands begging in the comments, breakdowns of the breakdowns, videos of the Times Square jumbotron—the numbers on this thing run easily into the billions.

Here’s what’s good: Unlike, say, “Man In Finance”, which was intentionally jaded, all meme, no melody, Romeo’s theme has some musical DNA to it. It’s like a Stevie Wonder lick, open-hearted and positive, something musicians hear and think: I want in.

By now, Dr Pepper has licensed the jingle and aired it as a national commercial. But the ad-agency’s professional remake is...nowhere...the trope of what happens when ‘Black’ music goes through a ‘white’ creative department.

Thankfully, the real groove is alive and well back in the algorithm. @iam_burrell set the tone—silky R&B, deep pocket, an added “ooo-oooh” that caught Romeo’s wobbles perfectly, and bagging himself 12.5m views.

That opened the studio door. @davebethellmusic came in with DX7 pads and Jupiter brass. @yosoytrips on live drums, @rj_bass on fingered bass. Benjamin Sturley, an LA composer with Netflix credits, couldn’t resist his own multi-instrument take.

Actual artists shredding.

I ran a real-world check. It’s 6:34 am, and when I pass my son bleary-eyed on the landing, I start singing. Yep, he knows it. Joins before I finish. For a moment, we’re in sync, like bathroom backup singers. Both grinning. Set for the day.

I can’t imagine there’s another bottomless drink we’ll go for at our next Nando’s.

A glimpse of the CMO becoming redundant.

Observers say Dr Pepper was slow to respond. I counted 23 days (including Christmas) from phone video to fully-made ad broadcast during the College Football Playoffs on ESPN.

During the same period, we’ve also had a Venezuelan president extracted by Delta Force and two killings under new federal enforcement. A few days in America is a long time right now.

Still, 23 days. Most big brands wouldn’t manage to brief it in that time. And whilst the effort made with the aired film looks like the absolute minimum, I’ve seen work come out of networks that was no better (and that’s after 23 months).

Then there’s the budget.

Romeo was reported to have banked $2 million, which ignited its own viral thread. But that figure is almost certainly false. If there was $2 million, it went on working media. The creative agency, as ever, will have done it mostly for the case study.

Drew Panayiotou, Chief Marketing Officer at Keurig Dr Pepper, commented officially: “Rather than creating content for social, we build it from social.”

Which scans like double-speak for: We got lucky.

Maybe.

Lucky is usually just history meets opportunity. And Dr Pepper has a lot of time in the market: the oldest major soft drink in America, founded in 1885, a year before Coca-Cola.

Dr Pepper’s special power is that it has a distribution quirk: bottled by Coca-Cola in some regions, PepsiCo in others, independents elsewhere. The Switzerland of soft drinks. Neither giant blocks it because both make money moving it. So Dr Pepper shows up on more fountains, in more vending machines, than a brand its size should.

That’s why the comments section of Romeo’s video reads like a roll-call of quick service restaurants: Denny’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Popeyes, Wingstop, Slim Jim, Subway, P.F. Chang’s—they all carry Dr Pepper, and they all piled in.

If distribution gives Dr Pepper reach, the Cadbury spinoff in 2008 gave them freedom to run their own play. Keurig bought it in 2018 for $18.7 billion. Last year, Dr Pepper pipped Pepsi to the number two slot, first time in forty years (both at 8.3% compared to Coca-Cola’s 19%). Dr Pepper’s market cap today, $36 billion+, nearly doubled in just seven years.

This stuff spills over into the brand. You buy a Dr Pepper when you don’t want Coca-Cola and you don’t want Pepsi. You try it because you’re opting out. Decades of this and you’ve got a strong nostalgic underdog. People who love Dr Pepper, really love it. Romeo orders it everywhere she goes, insists it comes without ice.

Most of this was already in place before Panayiotou arrived. So what does a CMO do with a brand that’s already working?

You get out the way.

Panayiotou is an immigrant kid from Queens. Parents who didn’t finish high school, didn’t speak much English. Brand names were some of the few words they used to navigate American life. Tide. Colgate. Dr Pepper. Familiar things in an unfamiliar place.

When brands are how your parents navigated a new country, you feel their weight. You don’t rush in to pitch agencies on another “reinvention”, the thing marketers usually can’t resist.

Then, you set the conditions. Creamy Coconut, Strawberries & Cream, Dr Pepper with pickles—flavour responses to last year’s dirty soda trend. Something his team will have been trend-jacking, but that nonetheless acted as a rehearsal for what was to come.

Ever since the Crocs and Stanley Cup playbook, outsourcing creativity has increasingly become the strategy. The algorithmic mirrorball is so vast now, spinning so many realities at once, that if you’ve got product, distribution, and heritage—and Dr Pepper has all three (plus, somehow, a vibe that feels oddly 1994, which is also having a moment)—creative “luck” is likely. Something will hit.

And the Romeos of this world have figured that out. Why grind through the creator economy, making niche content, community building, when you can throw a spark directly at a brand and let the For You Page be the tinder?

So yes, in brand-speak, this is “build from social”.

Except you’re not really building anything.

It’s more like the record label model. The internet does A&R and lets social media surface the hits. Then, and only then, does the corporation write the cheque. Consumer products companies, like record labels before them, used to be in the business of creative innovation. Now they’re closer to banks—they’ll only move once all possible risks have been removed.

In these same weeks, Ryanair traded insults with Elon Musk and bumped sales 3%. Harry Styles announced a comeback holding a 7-Eleven Big Gulp. This stuff is going to keep happening. Why go through all the pain, and unknown, of developing your own fame campaigns?

So, Panayiotou got out of the way, and there’s something admirable about that. The purest understanding of creativity has always been openness: ideas aren’t created, they’re allowed to emerge.

And yet one hit wonders don’t add up to as much as albums. Dr Pepper’s long-term commitment to the College Football Playoff, sponsor since 2014, will do more to cement Dr Pepper as the official alternative and rightly seems to be where Panayiotou’s focus is.

Net, borrowing interest is worth less than generating it, even if it’s popular. A reminder of Reith: Don’t give the audience what they want, they deserve far better than that.

Which in many ways is exactly what Romeo did. She gave Dr Pepper something better. Something no brief would have asked for. I don’t see why the brand wouldn’t build with this theme for a mighty long time. The notes and their story crystallise Dr Pepper, perfectly.

Back in Tacoma, the air still carries traces of sulfur from the old pulp mills. The city was supposed to be the great Pacific Northwest terminus, but Seattle got the gold rush in the end. They named Tacoma the “City of Destiny” anyway.

I hope whatever dollars Romeo can get out of this (Vita Coco, Hyundai seem to be in play) live up to the city’s original dreams. That she’s able to put a portfolio together that sees her and hers set up forever and the gold isn’t all Dr Pepper’s.

Beyond all this, we thank her.

She set us free from the drain of over-sophisticated, self-important advertising. From the bore of ads made for ad people. Strategists that pour over brand pyramids.

Instead, she gave us something that feels wholesome. Warm. Intuitive. And, a little groovy. The kind of moment the attention economy, and the joyless grind of engagement farming, almost never allows.

Romeo is a carer and a creative. Good and nice.

And deserves everything she gets.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

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Market Moves

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How reality TV ate American governance | Kyla Scanlon

Is the UK on the cusp of a productivity revival? | Financial Times

Brand Beat

TikTok’s first week under U.S. ownership was disastrous | The Guardian

Dr Pepper adapts viral TikTok jingle for TV ad | Ad Age

Reminder: Dr Pepper’s ’dirty’ marketing propelled it to second place | Fast Company

Coca-Cola sues Vue over cinema chain switch to Pepsi | The Guardian

The Elon Musk versus Ryanair feud on X | The Wall Street Journal

Agency leaders warn of the fallout of redundancies | The Drum

P&G leverages data and AI to navigate fragmented new media | Marketing Dive

How Bloom & Wild built confidence to invest in its brand | Marketing Week

Spotify ads show Lola Young, Olivia Dean and Addison Rae pre-fame | The Drum

Apple Watch calls time on ‘quitters day’ tradition | LBB Online

Beauty brands target single shoppers this Valentine’s Day | Business of Fashion

Dos Equis revives the most interesting man in the world | The Wall Street Journal

Gousto creates UPF ridden burger in protest | The Grocer

Gap names first entertainment chief to pursue Hollywood ambitions | Adweek

BBC strikes YouTube deal to captivate Gen Alpha viewers | Mediacat

M&S ‘bin-gate’ backlash shows social media’s double-edge | The Grocer

Disney forms unified marketing unit | Marketing Week

Why brands are choosing Pinterest instead of Instagram | Business of Fashion

Purpose is pointless, the Johnson & Johnson case highlights | On The Level

2026 Edelman trust barometer reveals shifting global trust trends | Edelman

Key takeaways most marketers overlooked at Davos | The Drum

Starting Up

Papier: the Gen-Z stationary brand founded by a millennial | Fortune

Inside Chilli’s CMO’s strategies for scaling | Spotify

FMCG, AI supply chain tool raises £1.5m | The Grocer

Survey finds angel investors most prone to inappropriate conduct | Sifted

Tech Tidbits

Big Tech’s landmark trial begins | NBC|

OpenAI ads are here, in their words | OpenAI

Meta blocks links to ICE list on Facebook, Instagram and Threads | Wired

AI impacts UK more than other major economies | The Guardian

Venture Vibes

What the world’s first trillionaire will mean | Quartz

Synthesia secures $200m Google Ventures-led round, hits $4bn valuation | Sifted

Cancer focussed VC firm raises another $200m | Forbes

The London VC that hit jackpot with Revolut | Financial Times

Design Driven

Experts assess Walkers’ biggest rebrand in 80 years | Creative Boom

Hershey’s adopts humble branding for marketing makeover | The Wall Street Journal

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Happiness

Why young people love the Grateful Dead | New Times

A 7-minute film will make you laugh and cry | Cup Of Jo

The happiness shortcut that hides in plain sight | Big Think

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