For the first time in Dr Pepper’s 140-year history, the brand is the second-most-popular soda in America. And now, it has a shiny new jingle to match.
In late December, TikTok creator Romeo Bingham, 25, posted a little ditty she had made up for Dr Pepper. “Dr Pepper, baby. It’s good and nice. Doo. Doo. Doo,” the tune went. In her caption, she tagged the company and noted: “Please get back to me with a proposition. We can make thousands together.”
The original post has garnered almost 54 million views, 6.4 million likes, and almost 500,000 bookmarks at the time of this writing. One month later, Bingham’s dreams were realized. Dr Pepper licensed the song and folded it into an NCAA football commercial.
TikTok creators capitalizing on viral moments is not unusual. Influencers have long been tagging brands in content in the hopes of landing freebies or a lucrative brand deal, as the booming influencer-marketing industry becomes ever-more saturated.
Here, the success of Bingham’s overt brand baiting may signal a subtle shift in power dynamics as creators compete for brands’ attention and marketing budgets.
Once the jingle became viral, Bingham’s comments section was inundated with requests from national brands. “Me next bb i beg,” wrote Denny’s Diner. “Yea imma need one of these theme songs right now,” added Buffalo Wild Wings. “GET HER ON THE PHONE NOW!!” Popeyes chimed in. “Not to be pick me, but US NEXT,” commented Welch’s Fruit Snacks. Bingham has since gone on to make jingles for Hyundai and Vita Coca, fully realizing the new American dream of overnight viral success.
Brands showing up in the comments sections on TikTok and Instagram, whether the post is about them or not, isn’t new. The top comments on a trending TikTok video often garner hundreds of thousands of likes, gaining brands the type of attention they could only dream of on their own channels.
But overnight, a new batch of “POV: Trying to make a jingle so I can quit my job” type videos have been cropping up across social media platforms. Some of the most popular of these jingle videos show brands actually replying to the creators in their comments sections—possibly as a shoot-for-the-moon attempt to replicate Dr Pepper’s hype.
With these public auditions in pursuit of 10 seconds of fame, brands might appear like the real winners, receiving massive amounts of unpaid creative labor—sometimes even full commercials—complete with engagement metrics and audience-testing in real time.
“If brands reward the noisiest creators with paid partnerships, this could lead to creators shilling spec work ads as a new content pillar,” Dayna Castillo, founder of the digital culture newsletter Silence, Brand!, told Fast Company. And yet, “brand baiting is normalizing unpaid promotional labor from creators, and long term, this practice risks burning out both audiences, brands, and creators.”
As she noted in a recent Substack post: “We no longer skip the ads. We consume the ads our peers made in hopes The Capitalism will notice.”
The warp speed with which the internet moves means that trying to re-create another’s recipe for viral success is unlikely to ever deliver the same results. As the saying goes: Lightning never strikes twice.
Instead, all that’s left to gain is further muddying the shared waters of the internet with subpar unpaid spon-con. (Bingham’s jingle was at least catchy!)