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The Pumpkin Spice Latte was turning 20.
To celebrate its icon status, we threw a digital birthday party, and invited our fans and followers to Pumpkin Like It's 2003.
Teleporting our social feeds back 20 years, we gave our fans and followers the chance to revel in the era and archetypes that had become synonymous with the PSL. We broke out the UGG Boots, velour tracksuits, and flip phones that were core to the drink's pop culture identity.
The result was a living piece of internet history, a breathing relic of 2003, and a dedication fitting for autumn's most iconic drink.
Whether it was an AIM inspired-display name (xXStarBucks03Xx), a Pumpkin personality quiz straight out of the early aughts' teen magazines, reality TV parodies, or vintage T9 text messages our followers could send to friends, we used every touchpoint to celebrate the PSL
Every year for the past two decades, the Pumpkin Spice Latte (“PSL”) at Starbucks marked the unofficial start of fall, becoming a bona fide cultural icon hundreds of brands have tried–and failed!–to emulate.
October 10th marked PSL’s official 20th birthday, unlocking a unique opportunity to celebrate the drink, its origin, and its place in popular culture. As agency of record for Starbucks, SPCSHP sought to reignite excitement for the drink and sustain sales through November.
Tapping into Y2K nostalgia – a favorite for our primary Millennial and Gen Z target customers – helped set the stage for a unique campaign strategy leveraging social-first tactics. However these segments have different relationships with nostalgia, the former lived through the 2000s in school and the latter discovering that timeframe now and romanticizing it. We architected a campaign and channel strategy to effectively connect with both, turning October 10th into an unofficial Pumpkin Spice holiday.
PSL’s birthday gave us the freedom to bring audiences back to everything they loved about the 2000s, inspiring pride in being a PSL fan and inviting people to recall fond memories of the past twenty autumns.
Nostalgia tends to manifest in 20 year cycles, and love for the early 2000s has been evident in recent popular culture. But, for Millennial and Gen Z customers alike, it wasn’t just the timing that created the nostalgia. After navigating the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the early 2000s had something they yearned for: simple pleasures. These joys include:
Non-invasive technology like AOL Instant Messenger and dial-up internet
“Iconic” accessories and fashion that let their personality and taste shine in-person rather than over Zoom
A sense of belonging, that has since been splintered by the always-on digital world we now inhabit
The campaign garnered 850MM+ paid media impressions across video, social, audio, and digital ad units. Across content related to PSL’s birthday, we generated a strong 7.1M video views and 358K likes across social channels.
