NBA player Anthony Edwards and Olympic sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson drank Sprite in the Coca-Cola brand’s most recent “Obey Your Thirst” ads, and the star athletes are not alone: Sprite has now surpassed Pepsi to become the No. 3 carbonated soft drink by volume in the U.S, per Beverage Digest data shared with Marketing Dive.
The sales milestone comes after an active year of marketing that saw the brand bring back “Obey Your Thirst” 30 years after the original campaign helped establish the brand’s individualist ethos. Launched last April, Sprite’s latest take on the tagline came amid a wave of nostalgia-washing, but the brand’s success suggests its what-is-old-is-new-again effort connected with consumers.
“‘Obey Your Thirst’ wasn’t just a relaunch of a platform, but really refreshing it for a new generation of consumers. Transparently, most of Gen Z wasn’t familiar with ‘Obey Your Thirst,’ so it was very much like launching a new campaign,” said AP Chaney, senior creative director of sparkling flavors at Coca-Cola. “The resonance has been great in terms of how it showed up and how we’re infiltrating culture.”
The decision to bring back “Obey Your Thirst” speaks to how the platform’s essence — of being true to yourself — resonates with Sprite’s core audience, per research done by the brand. That is especially true amid a social-media-heavy period that encourages social pressure around conforming and acting a certain way online.
“What our audience wants to feel is that it’s okay to to be yourself,” said Josh Kroo, vice president of sparkling flavors in Coca-Cola’s North American operating unit. “That authenticity is at the core of what we are showing with the partnerships that we have and with the way that we communicate.”
Picking winners
The launch of “Obey Your Thirst” recreated an iconic 1994 ad that starred Grant Hill, with Minnesota Timberwolves star Edwards subbing in for the NBA Hall of Famer. Edwards’ relationship with Sprite — which continued in a holiday ad that remixed “The Night Before Christmas” and a series of social-first spots — has coincided with his rising profile. Most recently, Edwards led his team to an upset of LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers in the first round of the NBA playoffs.
Edwards is not the only wagon that the brand hitched itself to early. Sprite last summer tapped Doechii as a participant in the third iteration of its Limelight music platform, weeks before the rapper would capture viral attention on the road to a Best Rap Album at the Grammys and high-profile ad appearances for Nike, Jack in the Box and Major League Soccer. For Sprite, finding the right partners is about finding figures that embody “Obey Your Thirst” — not keying in on a celebrity for celebrity’s sake.
“I live and breathe pop culture, what our consumers are doing and what they’re interested in,” Chaney said. “I wish we could say we do a whole bunch of research into who we’re picking and all these analytics, which we do later on… [but] it is more instinctual than anything.”
Those instincts have extended to connecting Sprite with subcultures on the rise before they get the notoriety they deserve, as the brand famously did with hip-hop. Sprite this year was the presenting partner of Unrivaled’s one-on-one tournament, an attention-grabbing play from the emerging women’s basketball league that could be adopted by the NBA.
“One of the things that we were super excited about on Unrivaled was getting in very early, particularly around women’s sports,” Chaney said. “It’s a place that we hadn’t really been, and so to do it with such an innovative and groundbreaking league, it really wasn’t a question in terms of if we should do it, it was how we should do it.”
Sprite plans to continue the partnership with Unrivaled and do more with the league in 2026.
Extending the brand
When Sprite launched the original “Obey Your Thirst” campaign in 1994, the brand could communicate everything it wanted the consumer to know in a 30-second TV commercial. That is obviously not the case today, as attention and media continue to fragment across channels. In kind, Sprite has extended the current iteration of the campaign, and others, with digital experiences like its “Obey Days” activation powered by QR codes on its packaging.
“All these touch points are an opportunity to reinforce the brand values and what we stand for,” Kroo said. “ We certainly sweat every asset pretty hard — big and small — and think about how to build legs to it beyond just what you might experience in a piece of video.”
Along with its QR code experience, Sprite last month launched Sprite Squad, a text-and-scan activation that gives consumers access to limited-time digital experiences tied to cultural passions in sports, music and fashion. The brand kicked off the effort by teaming with Black House Radio, a music platform focused on Black DJs that play house music, for an event and merchandise giveaway.
“We want our communication to be a two-way street,” Chaney said. “We don’t want to just serve messages at [consumers]… it’s also a way for them to connect and interact with the brand, as well.”
The Black House Radio collaboration was with Sprite Chill, a soft drink with a cherry-lime flavor and a proprietary cooling sensation that became a permanent addition to the brand’s portfolio this year. Sprite sees flavor innovations (including a forthcoming one that “blur[s] categories”) as platformable experiences that reinforce what the brand stands for and delivers. Innovation and marketing are two parts of the brand’s plan to strengthen its position in the soda standings.
“Sprite does have this momentum that we’re building on,” Kroo said. “We are planning to continue to invest more behind it, because we think it will play a super important role in the future of the total portfolio.”
