The challenge facing any marketer who inherits a successful campaign is not unlike that of a television showrunner taking over someone else's hit series: how to keep the thing alive without killing what made it work in the first place.
Drew Panayiotou, the chief marketing and innovation officer at Keurig Dr Pepper, appears to have settled on an answer. Mr. Panayiotou, who took stewardship of Fansville — the soft-drink brand's long-running college football advertising campaign — has opted to evolve the storytelling rather than abandon the premise entirely.
Fansville, for those who have somehow avoided it during autumn Saturdays, is a faux-dramatic series of commercials set in a football-obsessed town where residents treat Dr Pepper consumption with the same gravity others might reserve for matters of life and death. The campaign, created by Deutsch, has run for several seasons now, which in advertising terms qualifies it as something between a minor institution and a minor miracle.
The approach Mr. Panayiotou has taken — refreshing the narratives while preserving the core conceit — reflects a broader truth about long-running campaigns. Marketers are often tempted to declare victory and move on, or worse, to tinker with the formula until it becomes unrecognizable. (The advertising graveyard is well populated with campaigns that were "reimagined" into oblivion.)
What Fansville suggests is that audiences, like sitcom viewers, may be more loyal to familiar worlds than marketers sometimes credit. The trick is finding new stories to tell within them.
Whether Mr. Panayiotou can keep the franchise vital for another few seasons remains to be seen. But for now, Fansville remains on the air — which, in an era when the average campaign lifespan can be measured in fiscal quarters, counts as its own small achievement.
Original story published in adage.com: "Dr Pepper CMO on campaign evolutions—and their ends - Ad Age"