“Dr. Pepper baby, it’s good and nice! Doo-doo-doo!”, sang 25-year-old Romeo Bingham.
As we closed out the year in the late days of December, just two days before Christmas, my TikTok For You Page presented me a young individual with a tune in their heart.
Romeo Bingham (@romeosshow) stopped viewers to listen to the catchy new jingle they came up with for Dr. Pepper before they scrolled. “I have a theme song for Dr. Pepper, and it goes like this: ‘Dr. Pepper baby, it’s good and nice! Doo-doo-doo”. Right after that, my engagement with the video followed the usual watch, like, and scroll routine and they disappeared from my feed since.
Fast forward to a month later, lo and behold, there is a TikTok video about a new Dr. Pepper TV commercial in the United States. As enticing as it was in the visual sense, the jingle playing in the ad caught the attention of viewers. It was Romeo!
The TikTok posted by Romeo was not just any other video to Dr. Pepper’s marketing team, but they had found their next big hit in the creator’s vocals. The video garnered a whooping 92.3 million views, 9.7 million likes, and came with appreciation in the comments from brands such as Subway, Indeed, Popeyes, IKEA, Wingstop, and of course, Dr. Pepper among many other brands who wanted the creator to be the voice of their next commercials too!
Dr. Pepper wasted no time and put Romeo’s hit tune to use, including the process of licensing the jingle and made the new song using the creator’s original vocals with slight drastic alterations to the melody. The brand stayed true to what the audience believed in and stayed authentic to the song that viewers were first introduced to.
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The commercial debuted on the 19th of January 2026 during the College Football Playoff National Championship, which is one of the most-watched sporting events of the year.
The ad’s fun and thirst-quenching visuals entail seamlessly edited cuts of people enjoying the beverage, with Romeo’s vocals setting the tone of the commercial. In the ad, different flavours and variants of Dr. Pepper drinks are showcased. This was a life-changing moment for Romeo as this also gained them an opportunity to make a new jingle for the world’s leading coconut water brand, Vita Coco, and most recently, a paid partnership with Hyundai on TikTok (which includes a Romeo original jingle, of course).
With the recent surge of brands now relying on AI to do their advertising, Dr. Pepper saw the power of authenticity and applied it to their best ability. Outdoing what any automated or artificially generated prompt would have produced. The ad was people-centered, which is what made it special. The people loved it and the brand saw this as an opportunity to center the love of the people in its promotion.
Organic and manmade marketing is still presenting its power in a time where AI is shifting the way in which messages are produced and comprehended.
