Michael Smith steers Starry to growth, taking on Sprite with PepsiCo’s latest hit

Starry, the Gen Z-focused lemon-lime soda from PepsiCo, is heading skyward behind Michael Smith. The VP of Flavored CSD Marketing at PepsiCo helped Starry exceed $500,000 in sales and achieve a 5.3% share of the lemon-lime soda market in its 2023 debut. Starry’s first-year unit sales exceeded what its predecessor, Sierra Mist, sold in its last four years combined. And Starry has continued growing at a double-figure rate so far in 2024, said Smith. See Ad Age’s 2024 Breakout Brand Leaders and Work here Coca-Cola’s Sprite remains a strong category leader, but Slice or Sierra Mist, Starry is not. “We have a long way to go—we have an incredibly strong incumbent competitor that’s been around for decades,” Smith said. “But as far as lemon-lime CSD [carbonated soft drink] launches, of which PepsiCo has done far too many, we feel really good about this one.” Starry’s success has been a matter of executing against its objectives, Smith said, putting the brand in front of its audience where that audience is. Starry is leveraging a partnership with the NBA, for example, and getting traction in foodservice, where young people often experience a brand for the first time. Notably, these encounters are making just the kind of impression Starry’s creators had hoped they would. “When consumers talk to us about Starry, they talk to us about being refreshing, bright, positive, optimistic—all the things that we were trying to imbue in the brand naturally to begin with,” Smith said. “It feels more multicultural than the rest of our CSD portfolio, which is, again, something that we were trying to deliver with this offering.” Starry’s big year was capped by a spot on the 2024 Super Bowl stage. Seeking an icon who could impart the same positive energy as the brand, Smith lined up rapper Ice Spice to star in the spot, which garnered 22.5 billion impressions and more than 300 pieces of TikTok content with more than 100 million combined views. For Starry’s NBA partnership, Smith worked behind the scenes to build the brand’s roster of basketball talent, including Zion Williamson, Zach LaVine, A’ja Wilson, Klay Thompson and Giannis Antetokounmpo. See Ad Age’s 2024 Breakout Brand Leaders and Work here Which entrepreneur do you admire the most and why? Mike Cessario of Liquid Death is someone I admire a lot. He had the guts and vision to enter an established category with a brand that broke every single category norm and has stayed true to that tonally and in the way that they marketed and brought it to life for consumers. What’s currently on your bedside reading list? I’ve been spending a lot of time with “Day Trading Attention,” which is Gary Vaynerchuk’s book that came out this summer. I know Gary. I love the book. You can hear his kind of infectious positivity through every page. Something that he preaches, and that I believe in, is that brands need to move away from a campaign mindset and move towards operating and owning their brand on a day-to-day basis, especially in the social media marketplace. So I’ve been trying to absorb a bit of that and then put it into practice for our brands. What is the best career advice you’ve gotten? “You can’t build a road map without a destination.” That’s something that was told to me early in my career and made me really start thinking about what success would look like so I could actually plot a path there rather than making a series of short-term decisions. Name one brand, other than the one you work for, that you admire. I’ll go with Scrub Daddy. We oftentimes think about the delineation between product messaging and brand messaging, where one has to be more dry and informational, and the other can be entertaining and inspirational. They do both all the time, and they do it in the language of the internet. So there’s a lot we can learn from them. What is your secret weapon for business success? I would say that I’ve never been willing to accept “because it’s always been done that way.” For better or worse, I’ve always come into new roles and new situations, trying to make processes better, make brands better, make our marketing better without being too beholden to what has come before.

Michael Smith steers Starry to growth, taking on Sprite with PepsiCo’s latest hit

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