Sprite's Changing Relationship to Hip Hop: From Ogilvy & Mather to Crispin Porter + Bogusky

As some have recently expressed, Sprite's ditching of Miles Thirst could be seen as a move away from hip hop and, perhaps, indicative of a larger marketing trend.

Though launching a Sprite campaign focused on the lymon angle, Sprite will still hold a:
fashion event -- the inaugural Sprite Street Couture Showcase -- at Guastavino's in New York. The event will feature collections from streetware designers, including Etnies, LRG, Rocawear, Triple Five Soul and WESC.

Of course, such an event could simply be playing out older commitments or not viewed as hip hop specific but, rather, urban in its broader dimensions.

On the other hand, the Sprite/MSN Exposure site features urban and hip hop related elements, with a shift from the focus on a star, well, Miles Thirst, to real people becoming celebs for their realness, or something.  Very of the times.

The earlier Sprite/MSN collab The Scenario featured Miles Thirst and hip hop djs, so Sprite's been online for a while.  Perhaps current developments are more about Sprite's changing relationship to hip hop rather than an abandonment scenario.

Of course, they also have to do with a shift in ad agencies from Miles Thirst creators Ogilvy & Mather to Crispin Porter + Bogusky.  CP+B are the ones doing the subLYMONal campaign featuring the term OBEY from Obey Your Thirst that I can't help but think resonates due to Shepard Fairey's OBEY campaign.

Sprite has also had a mostly unrelated "Show & proove" street campaign going since April:
To try and shake things up at street level, Sprite is employing a campaign that loosely strings together viral video, guerrilla postings and print ads in alternative weeklies all of which ask, "Do U have the proof?" The new logo, which looks like a football made of half lemon and half lime is featured, although the brand name is not revealed.  The "Show & prove" guerrilla effort was originally touted as an underground buzz-building ploy, a la Halo 2's ilikebees.com, complete with a countdown to the launch event. However many of the plans, created by Commonground, Chicago, have yet to come to fruition or have been scrapped altogether.

Sounds like a bit of chaos and also that the activities related to hip hop in some way, primarily the fashion show and the Exposure site, are all separate from CP+B's core campaign, which might not be a good sign for the future of such projects.

Comments

[dj mirateck]

for some perspective,

Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B for short) = the G-Unit = Microsoft of the advertising world

you love to hate them, but they get their money

[Clyde Smith]

Yeah, I'll definitely be writing more about them soon.