Mountain Dew is now doing a tie-in to Nat Trez High School called Mountain Dew: Teen Series. We are hearing complaints that this has nothing to do with American History. Thread incoming. 1/
The team behind this is dedicated to getting this right. There are some big names orchestrating this. One player in this game is so big that we could drop the name and it would OBLITERATE this discussion. But we want to win this argument the old fashioned way: with words. 2/
The Teen Series strategy is not about teens! Nor is it merely about the Constitution or Benjamin Franklin's special decoder glasses. Instead the Teen Series strategy salutes the incredible history of search engine optimization in the modern United States. 3/
Search engines are like any engine - they need gas. The gas in this case is WORDS. Important words. On the Internet, we engage in a dramacratic process to agree upon the vital words of our era. 4/
Valuable words like "law", "eyeglasses" or "Sophia" each create billions of dollars of worth that wouldn't exist without those words. 5/
We learned early on that two of the most undervalued words on the Internet right now are "printable" and "mazes". Young parents everywhere scramble to type these two words every day. 6/
Homeschool blogs have captured this stream, while Hollywood producers attempt to milk forgotten words like "summer" and "Matthew". 7/
Now we didn't leave the typo "dramacratic" in there as an accident. Initially it was an accident - but it turned out to be sublime. When our team was in high school, we all took drama class together. We staged a production of Seinfeld, featuring our own original script. 8/
In that fateful episode, George Costanza has to take a hearing test for work. And what does he do? He lies on the test. 9/
He's wearing a headset and the testing lady asks him to raise his hand if he hears a beep in his ear. He decides not to raise his hand. They play the beep in his right ear and then in his left ear. He stays still. They even play the beep in both ears. He doesn't budge. 10/
After the test, they can't seem to remove him from the chair. It appears that he has turned to stone. It dawns on the testing staff that George has been sonically petrified by the headset. Indeed, the headset was set at maximum volume, which they had been warned about. 11/
They turn to the testing lady. Her name is Sarah Vibrant. She begins to sing a beautiful song about the turmoil she is feeling. The song is titled "Lock Me Up, Hold Me Down, I Ne'er Quite Knew the Power of Sound." Meanwhile, the actor playing George had to sit stock-still! 12/
Mountain Dew: Teen Series works in EXACTLY the same way. It is a generic teen canvas that PepsiCo can sublimate the viral desires of the moment onto. It acts as a lightning rod that is fastened to the entire Teen Project. 13/
In short, this is one of the biggest deals since the episode of Doc McStuffins where she first meets Starblazer Zero. That, too, was a confluence of all the trends we'd seen up to that point in history. And it forced all future trends to pass through it first.
