Building the social media playbook for one of the most recognised beverages in the region
Client: Sprite Middle East (via J. Walter Thompson)
Year: 2019 to 2020
Deliverable: Comprehensive Social Media Brand Playbook
Services: Brand Strategy, Content Architecture, Design Direction, Animation Guidelines, Sample Content Production
Market: Middle East and GCC
The Brief
Add Hype operates across two planes. We work directly with brands, and we embed within major agency ecosystems when a specific creative capability is needed. This project was the latter.
J. Walter Thompson had been Sprite’s agency across the Middle East for years. In 2019, with COVID reshaping how teams operated and creative resources stretched across the entire industry, JWT brought in Ubaid Ullah Ahmed, founder of Add Hype, to lead the creative build of Sprite’s social media playbook. The ask was clear: build a comprehensive content system that would define how Sprite speaks to young people across the region. A document that any team could pick up and execute from.
The scope was significant. Sprite’s audience (Gen Z, 19 to 21-year-olds with a deep affinity for street culture, music, and self-expression) needed a playbook that went far beyond content calendars. It needed to be a full creative operating system for the brand’s social presence.
The Challenge
Sprite is a brand that has always stood for something: refreshment, authenticity, self-expression. But in the Middle East, the brand’s social channels lacked a coherent creative system. Posts went up. Content was produced. But there was no underlying logic, no thread connecting who the brand was to what it published. The deeper challenge was the audience. Gen Z in the Middle East aren’t a monolith. They follow global culture (streetwear, basketball, music) but they’re also deeply rooted in their own identity. Building a playbook meant understanding both worlds and finding the seam between them. And it had to be built to last. This wasn’t a campaign. This was infrastructure. Whatever we created would be handed to multiple agencies and teams across the region as the definitive reference for Sprite’s social voice.
The Strategy
We started with a single truth about Sprite’s audience: social media isn’t something they use. It’s how they exist. It’s their method of self-expression, their proof of identity. Any brand trying to reach them on those platforms has to earn its place by being genuinely part of their world, not just appearing next to it.
From that, we built the campaign platform: Express Your Thirst. Not just a tagline. It was a positioning that linked Sprite’s core product truth (refreshment, crispness, that first sip) to what the audience actually craves: the permission to be exactly who they are.
We then structured the entire social presence around four content pillars that mapped directly to how this audience spends their time and builds their identity:
- Pop Culture: Sprite at the intersection of music, fashion, and the moments that define the cultural conversation
- Hypebeast: the brand as a badge in the world of streetwear, art, and lifestyle credibility
- Eccentric: unexpected, between-meal moments that create stories and stand out in the feed
- YOLO: Sprite in the middle of adventure, adrenaline, and the moments that feel too good not to share
Each pillar had its own visual language, caption voice, and content rationale. Specific enough to brief any creator or content team, flexible enough to evolve with trends.
What We Built
The playbook wasn’t a mood board. It was a fully operational creative system, designed to be executed by teams who hadn’t been part of building it.
Brand Architecture
We defined Sprite’s brand purpose for the region (refreshing teens’ lives by promoting and encouraging acts of self-expression) and mapped it through values (authenticity, self-confidence, transparency), personality (social, quirky, confident, authentic), and promise (Sprite will always refresh your mind and body, enabling you to express yourself). Every decision downstream traced back to this.
Target Audience Profiling
We built a detailed profile of the primary audience: 19 to 21-year-olds with a Gen Z mindset. Always-on, phone-native, demanding of authenticity, fluent in global culture, and quick to call out anything that feels forced. They don’t want ads. They want brands that understand them. We documented exactly what that means in practice and how Sprite’s content needs to respond to it.
Content Pillar System
For each of the four pillars, we produced sample content: real mockups showing how the pillar looks in the feed, with captions and hashtag usage. This gave JWT and any subsequent agency a concrete starting point, not a theoretical one. The sample posts covered everything from street photography and basketball courts to food pairing and music events.
Platform-Specific Strategy
We specified how the brand should behave differently across platforms, not just what to post, but how to listen, engage, and grow. The playbook included influencer integration guidelines, with a specific approach for South Asian influencers, which represent a significant audience segment across the GCC.
Design Direction
Every visual element was specified: the Sprite green palette, the Dimple Bottle as the hero asset, typography guidelines for social, photography principles (authentic yet not raw, urban and beach environments, no magic potion executions). The design direction made it possible for any creative team to produce on-brand work without needing to brief the original team.
The Outcome
The playbook was adopted as the official social media operating system for Sprite Middle East, and distributed to partner agencies across the region as the definitive reference for all social content production.
This is what the Add Hype partnership model is built for. When a brand or an agency needs creative depth that operates with speed, cultural understanding, and real executional range, we come in and build the thing. Ubaid personally led the work from brief to final delivery, ensuring the playbook reflected a genuine understanding of the audience rather than a generic framework applied from the outside.
JWT has since been acquired and integrated into the broader WPP network. The playbook remains one of the more complete brand social systems we’ve produced: a full creative infrastructure for one of the most recognisable beverages on the planet, built through genuine collaboration between two agencies who understood what the work needed to be.
