What Dr Pepper's "Fansville" Teaches Growing Brands About Playing the Long Game
30 minute read
30 minute read
Matt Russell
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Strategy
What Dr Pepper's "Fansville" Teaches Growing Brands About Playing the Long Game
What Dr Pepper's "Fansville" Teaches Growing Brands About Playing the Long Game
What Dr Pepper's "Fansville" Teaches Growing Brands About Playing the Long Game
If you've watched college football on a Saturday any time since 2018, you've been to Fansville. Maybe not on purpose. A commercial starts, and before anybody says a word about soda, you already know where you are: a small town where college football is the only thing that matters, the sheriff takes rivalry crimes very seriously, and every crisis ends with someone holding a Dr Pepper.
And if you're honest, you had a small, slightly embarrassing thought: I wonder what's going on in Fansville this week.
That thought is worth a fortune. Dr Pepper has spent nine seasons building it, and this year Fansville officially became the longest-running ad campaign in college football history. Most businesses never get anywhere close, and it usually isn't the budget holding them back. They change their marketing right about the time customers start to recognize it.
First, what Fansville actually is
Fansville is a mock TV drama told 30 seconds at a time, made with the ad agency Deutsch. Dr Pepper calls it a satirical episodic drama. To me it plays like a lost episode of a late-90s WB teen show: picture Dawson's Creek, if everyone in town cared way too much about the rivalry game. It launched in 2018, when Dr Pepper retired Larry Culpepper, the fictional concession guy who had carried the brand's college football ads since 2014. Every fall brings a new season of episodes (seven of them in 2024) running on ESPN, CBS and Fox, plus digital, radio, billboards and social.
Brian Bosworth plays the sheriff. Real college stars have played themselves since 2021. This season, LSU coach Lane Kiffin got pulled over for an illegal lane change and rolled his window up on the cop, a move he improvised on set. Of course he did.
It's goofy. It's also one of the smartest pieces of brand strategy on television, and nearly all of it works for any business…even one that will never buy a second of national TV airtime.
The strategy behind the teen drama
“Playing the long game” sounds like a fancy way of saying “be patient.” It’s really three decisions in a row: pick a strategy worth committing to, trust it long enough to pay off, and keep the message fresh inside a frame people recognize. Dr Pepper got all three right.
Lesson 1: Pick a strategy worth committing to.
Dr Pepper’s strategy was right before anyone wrote the first joke. The audience: college football fans. The media: the game broadcasts, on fall Saturdays, when those fans are on the couch, relaxed and in no hurry to change the channel. The core idea: football, rooted in something true about the brand. Dr Pepper was born in Waco, Texas, in 1885 and built its following across the South, and it has sponsored the College Football Playoff since 2014. Football is home turf, not a random sponsorship buy.
The format had room to grow, too. A single comic character can only do so many bits before he wears out. A whole town can hold any storyline college football throws at it. That’s my read, not Dr Pepper’s stated reason, but nine seasons in, the town hasn’t run out of material.
Lesson 2: Trust your strategy long enough to compound.
Once the homework is done, the hard part is just staying the course and resisting the urge to pivot.
College football has been turned upside down since 2018. Players can get paid now, the playoff expanded, conferences got shuffled like a deck of cards. Dr Pepper stayed in the same town through all of it. Its brand team describes Fansville as a compounding asset they've invested in for almost a decade, and that's the right way to think about it. Three things build on each other over time: recognition (people know it's you), familiarity (you feel like part of their routine) and trust (they believe you'll show up and deliver). None of them arrive in month one.
Growing businesses tend to do the opposite. They pick a good audience and a good channel, run it for six weeks, don't hear the phone ring off the hook, and pull the plug. That's selling a stock the week after you buy it. The returns were on their way. You just left before they got there.
The irony is that Dr Pepper could afford to start over every fall. You can't. When the budget is small, every dollar has to build on the one before it. And fair warning: you'll get bored of your own marketing long before your customers have noticed it.
The principle: before you commit for months or years, get the fundamentals right: the right audience, the right media, and a core idea that’s true to who you are and big enough to hold new stories.
Lesson 3: Recognize first, then surprise.
When I sold print advertising for Cowboys & Indians Magazine, first-time advertisers planning a long run of ads always asked me for advice on their creative. My answer never changed. Don't run the same ad every issue, or readers will think "seen it" and turn the page. But don't change everything either. Before they read a single word, the colors, the logo, the size and the layout should already tell them it's you. Keep the frame. Change the message.
It's the same rule that worked for the sports bars and music venues advertising in my college newspaper. Same box, same look every week, so students knew where to look. What changed was the reason to read it: this week's drink specials, who's playing Friday night.
Fansville is that advice with a network TV budget. The town, the look, the sheriff and the teen-drama tone never move. The episode always does: real college players starting in 2021, Jerry Jones welcoming fans to "Protown" in 2025, Lane Kiffin and transfer portal jokes this fall. Derek Dabrowski, who runs the brand, put it in five words: "Consistency doesn't mean sameness."
College paper, luxury publication, national TV. Very different budgets. Same rule.
The principle: keep the frame, change the message. People should know it's you before they know what you're saying.
Lesson 4: The long game is a sales strategy.
In case this sounds like brand theory with no money attached: in 2023, Dr Pepper passed Pepsi to become America's number two soda. Barely. Both had 8.3% of the market, which is a very Fansville way to win a title. Football wasn't the only reason, but Marketing Dive credits it as a big part. And Keurig Dr Pepper's CEO said last season's localized Fansville ads drove more than double the sales lift of the company's national average.
The principle: patience isn't the opposite of results. The long game just pays out on a longer clock.
You don't need Dr Pepper's budget. Ask Dalworth.
If you asked me for Dalworth Carpet Cleaning’s phone number right now, I wouldn’t look it up. I’d sing it: ♪ 267-8433, because the next best thing to new is Dalworth clean! ♪
That's a strange thing to still be carrying around. Nobody memorizes phone numbers anymore. Our phones do it for us. There are maybe a handful left in my head: the house I grew up in, Jenny's 867-5309, and a carpet cleaner in Euless. One of those is my childhood. One is a 1981 pop song. The other one is an ad.
It's not just me. In 2017 a D Magazine writer asked readers which local jingle was the catchiest of all time. She made the case for Dalworth, admitting that "I don't know my own mother's phone number by heart," but she still knew theirs, more than a decade after she'd last seen the ad.
Here's how a carpet cleaner pulled that off. James Smith started Dalworth in October 1976 with a used van bought on an $1,800 bank loan and a windowless $25-a-month office in Irving. He was the only employee. In 1988 he spent $3,500 on a jingle, and he credits it with putting Dalworth on the map. The version most of us know was sung by Carly Reign, who was 21 when she recorded it at TM Studios in Dallas. It got far enough around that Ellen DeGeneres heard it in Dallas and sang it on her show.
Run it through the same four lessons as Fansville and it holds up.
Smart choices. Think about when you actually need a carpet cleaner. Not often, and usually in a hurry. The dog had an accident. The in-laws land Saturday. Somebody's red wine lost a fight with the couch. In 1988, your next move was the Yellow Pages, where a full page of carpet cleaners fought for your attention. Dalworth's job wasn't to make you care about carpet. It was to be the number already in your head when that moment came, so you never opened the book. That's my read, not something Smith has said, but it explains why the whole jingle is built around a phone number.
Trust it long enough to compound. The jingle was still running on DFW television more than 20 years later. In that time the Yellow Pages faded, cell phones took over, and Google became the phone book. The number kept working anyway. Google it today and 817-267-8433 still comes up as Dalworth's number. And as DFW grew into more area codes, the seven digits came along. Dalworth holds 267-8433 in 817, 214 and even Austin’s 512, so the jingle works wherever you hear it.
Try this. Put two people in a room, one who grew up in Dallas and one who just moved here. Ask them both for a carpet cleaner, fast. The new guy grabs his phone, opens Google, and starts scrolling past ads for every other carpet cleaner in town. The Dallas kid just says the number. A jingle Dalworth bought in 1988 still beats a smartphone, and it skips the search results, where Dalworth's competitors are paying to get in the way.
Keep the frame, change the message. Fansville's frame is a town. Dalworth's is about ten seconds of audio at the end of the spot. Whatever comes before it can change: a season, a special, a service people didn't know Dalworth offered. The jingle doesn't care what the spot is about. And because the frame is sound, it goes anywhere with a speaker: broadcast TV, radio, streaming TV, a podcast. A logo needs you to look at the screen. A jingle just needs you in the room.
It shows up in the numbers. By 2016, the one-van company had 141 employees, 106 vehicles, eight divisions and more than $21 million in expected sales, and it was still family-run. Smith gives the jingle credit for helping Dalworth stand out, but he's clear it isn't the whole story. The bigger difference, he says, is how they treat customers. That's the right order. The jingle gets you the call. The work gets you the next one.
The principle: your frame doesn't have to be a fictional town. It can be ten seconds and a phone number, as long as you stick with it.
What brand consistency looks like for a growing business in 2027
You don't need a fictional town or a former NFL linebacker. You need the right audience, the right places to reach them, one idea worth repeating, and a frame people recognize.
The rule hasn't changed since back when colleges still printed a weekly newspaper. Your customer now meets you on streaming TV, on Instagram, in a newsletter, on your Google profile and, more and more, inside an AI assistant's answer. Your frame has to survive the jump between every one of those channels.
The good news is that tools that used to belong to Dr Pepper now belong to you, too. Streaming TV can target a handful of zip codes. A regional publication's newsletter or a niche podcast can reach exactly the people your business wants. A 1988 jingle would work on every one of them, which tells you the frame matters more than the channel.
There's a 2027 bonus, too. A business that describes itself the same way everywhere, with a steady stream of content behind it, gives AI assistants a much clearer picture to work from when someone asks who to call. Consistency used to help people remember you. Now it may help the machines recommend you.
Nobody remembers the ad. Everybody remembers the town.
Here's what Dr Pepper actually did. It picked the right audience, in the right place, with an idea that was true to the brand. It stayed put long enough for recognition, familiarity and trust to stack up. It kept the frame and changed the message every single week. And it's getting paid for all of it.
None of that requires a national budget. Dalworth did it with $3,500 and a phone number. What it does require is deciding what your town is, and then having the nerve to live there for a while. That's the kind of big-brand thinking Future Days Media brings to growing businesses, sized for a real budget.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find out what's going on in Fansville this week.
Matt is the founder and brand strategy director of Future Days Media.
4. Sources Cited
Keurig Dr Pepper, "Fandom Never Sleeps: Dr Pepper Premieres Season 9 of Fansville" (Aug 27, 2026)
Marketing Dive, "How Dr Pepper's Fansville campaign stays relevant and drives outcomes" (Aug 27, 2026)
Forbes, "Lane Kiffin Stars in Fansville Season 9 From Dr Pepper" (Aug 27, 2026)
Forbes, "Dr Pepper Retiring Larry Culpepper and Launching Fansville This College Football Season" (Aug 2018)
Keurig Dr Pepper, Fansville Season 7 announcement (Aug 2024)
MediaPost, "Dr Pepper Takes Fansville Into The Great Unknown" (2024)
Sports Illustrated, "An NIL First: Clemson Quarterback D.J. Uiagalelei to Star in Dr Pepper National Ad Campaign" (Aug 2021)
MediaPost, "KDP's College Football-Themed Fansville Moves Toward Pro Town" (2025)
CNN via ABC7, "Dr Pepper passes Pepsi as second biggest soda brand behind Coke" (Beverage Digest data)
Marketing Dive, "How Dr Pepper passed Pepsi by marketing around football, flavor innovation" (June 2024)
Fort Worth Business Press, "A family affair: Customer service, commitment and vision drive Dalworth to success" (Nov 19, 2016)
Fort Worth Business Press, "In Market: Here's the dirt on that commercial" (Oct 14, 2016)
D Magazine, "Which is the Most Infectious Local Jingle of All Time?" (Jan 2017)
What Dr Pepper's "Fansville" Teaches Growing Brands About Playing the Long Game
If you've watched college football on a Saturday any time since 2018, you've been to Fansville. Maybe not on purpose. A commercial starts, and before anybody says a word about soda, you already know where you are: a small town where college football is the only thing that matters, the sheriff takes rivalry crimes very seriously, and every crisis ends with someone holding a Dr Pepper.
And if you're honest, you had a small, slightly embarrassing thought: I wonder what's going on in Fansville this week.
That thought is worth a fortune. Dr Pepper has spent nine seasons building it, and this year Fansville officially became the longest-running ad campaign in college football history. Most businesses never get anywhere close, and it usually isn't the budget holding them back. They change their marketing right about the time customers start to recognize it.
First, what Fansville actually is
Fansville is a mock TV drama told 30 seconds at a time, made with the ad agency Deutsch. Dr Pepper calls it a satirical episodic drama. To me it plays like a lost episode of a late-90s WB teen show: picture Dawson's Creek, if everyone in town cared way too much about the rivalry game. It launched in 2018, when Dr Pepper retired Larry Culpepper, the fictional concession guy who had carried the brand's college football ads since 2014. Every fall brings a new season of episodes (seven of them in 2024) running on ESPN, CBS and Fox, plus digital, radio, billboards and social.
Brian Bosworth plays the sheriff. Real college stars have played themselves since 2021. This season, LSU coach Lane Kiffin got pulled over for an illegal lane change and rolled his window up on the cop, a move he improvised on set. Of course he did.
It's goofy. It's also one of the smartest pieces of brand strategy on television, and nearly all of it works for any business…even one that will never buy a second of national TV airtime.
The strategy behind the teen drama
“Playing the long game” sounds like a fancy way of saying “be patient.” It’s really three decisions in a row: pick a strategy worth committing to, trust it long enough to pay off, and keep the message fresh inside a frame people recognize. Dr Pepper got all three right.
Lesson 1: Pick a strategy worth committing to.
Dr Pepper’s strategy was right before anyone wrote the first joke. The audience: college football fans. The media: the game broadcasts, on fall Saturdays, when those fans are on the couch, relaxed and in no hurry to change the channel. The core idea: football, rooted in something true about the brand. Dr Pepper was born in Waco, Texas, in 1885 and built its following across the South, and it has sponsored the College Football Playoff since 2014. Football is home turf, not a random sponsorship buy.
The format had room to grow, too. A single comic character can only do so many bits before he wears out. A whole town can hold any storyline college football throws at it. That’s my read, not Dr Pepper’s stated reason, but nine seasons in, the town hasn’t run out of material.
Lesson 2: Trust your strategy long enough to compound.
Once the homework is done, the hard part is just staying the course and resisting the urge to pivot.
College football has been turned upside down since 2018. Players can get paid now, the playoff expanded, conferences got shuffled like a deck of cards. Dr Pepper stayed in the same town through all of it. Its brand team describes Fansville as a compounding asset they've invested in for almost a decade, and that's the right way to think about it. Three things build on each other over time: recognition (people know it's you), familiarity (you feel like part of their routine) and trust (they believe you'll show up and deliver). None of them arrive in month one.
Growing businesses tend to do the opposite. They pick a good audience and a good channel, run it for six weeks, don't hear the phone ring off the hook, and pull the plug. That's selling a stock the week after you buy it. The returns were on their way. You just left before they got there.
The irony is that Dr Pepper could afford to start over every fall. You can't. When the budget is small, every dollar has to build on the one before it. And fair warning: you'll get bored of your own marketing long before your customers have noticed it.
The principle: before you commit for months or years, get the fundamentals right: the right audience, the right media, and a core idea that’s true to who you are and big enough to hold new stories.
Lesson 3: Recognize first, then surprise.
When I sold print advertising for Cowboys & Indians Magazine, first-time advertisers planning a long run of ads always asked me for advice on their creative. My answer never changed. Don't run the same ad every issue, or readers will think "seen it" and turn the page. But don't change everything either. Before they read a single word, the colors, the logo, the size and the layout should already tell them it's you. Keep the frame. Change the message.
It's the same rule that worked for the sports bars and music venues advertising in my college newspaper. Same box, same look every week, so students knew where to look. What changed was the reason to read it: this week's drink specials, who's playing Friday night.
Fansville is that advice with a network TV budget. The town, the look, the sheriff and the teen-drama tone never move. The episode always does: real college players starting in 2021, Jerry Jones welcoming fans to "Protown" in 2025, Lane Kiffin and transfer portal jokes this fall. Derek Dabrowski, who runs the brand, put it in five words: "Consistency doesn't mean sameness."
College paper, luxury publication, national TV. Very different budgets. Same rule.
The principle: keep the frame, change the message. People should know it's you before they know what you're saying.
Lesson 4: The long game is a sales strategy.
In case this sounds like brand theory with no money attached: in 2023, Dr Pepper passed Pepsi to become America's number two soda. Barely. Both had 8.3% of the market, which is a very Fansville way to win a title. Football wasn't the only reason, but Marketing Dive credits it as a big part. And Keurig Dr Pepper's CEO said last season's localized Fansville ads drove more than double the sales lift of the company's national average.
The principle: patience isn't the opposite of results. The long game just pays out on a longer clock.
You don't need Dr Pepper's budget. Ask Dalworth.
If you asked me for Dalworth Carpet Cleaning’s phone number right now, I wouldn’t look it up. I’d sing it: ♪ 267-8433, because the next best thing to new is Dalworth clean! ♪
That's a strange thing to still be carrying around. Nobody memorizes phone numbers anymore. Our phones do it for us. There are maybe a handful left in my head: the house I grew up in, Jenny's 867-5309, and a carpet cleaner in Euless. One of those is my childhood. One is a 1981 pop song. The other one is an ad.
It's not just me. In 2017 a D Magazine writer asked readers which local jingle was the catchiest of all time. She made the case for Dalworth, admitting that "I don't know my own mother's phone number by heart," but she still knew theirs, more than a decade after she'd last seen the ad.
Here's how a carpet cleaner pulled that off. James Smith started Dalworth in October 1976 with a used van bought on an $1,800 bank loan and a windowless $25-a-month office in Irving. He was the only employee. In 1988 he spent $3,500 on a jingle, and he credits it with putting Dalworth on the map. The version most of us know was sung by Carly Reign, who was 21 when she recorded it at TM Studios in Dallas. It got far enough around that Ellen DeGeneres heard it in Dallas and sang it on her show.
Run it through the same four lessons as Fansville and it holds up.
Smart choices. Think about when you actually need a carpet cleaner. Not often, and usually in a hurry. The dog had an accident. The in-laws land Saturday. Somebody's red wine lost a fight with the couch. In 1988, your next move was the Yellow Pages, where a full page of carpet cleaners fought for your attention. Dalworth's job wasn't to make you care about carpet. It was to be the number already in your head when that moment came, so you never opened the book. That's my read, not something Smith has said, but it explains why the whole jingle is built around a phone number.
Trust it long enough to compound. The jingle was still running on DFW television more than 20 years later. In that time the Yellow Pages faded, cell phones took over, and Google became the phone book. The number kept working anyway. Google it today and 817-267-8433 still comes up as Dalworth's number. And as DFW grew into more area codes, the seven digits came along. Dalworth holds 267-8433 in 817, 214 and even Austin’s 512, so the jingle works wherever you hear it.
Try this. Put two people in a room, one who grew up in Dallas and one who just moved here. Ask them both for a carpet cleaner, fast. The new guy grabs his phone, opens Google, and starts scrolling past ads for every other carpet cleaner in town. The Dallas kid just says the number. A jingle Dalworth bought in 1988 still beats a smartphone, and it skips the search results, where Dalworth's competitors are paying to get in the way.
Keep the frame, change the message. Fansville's frame is a town. Dalworth's is about ten seconds of audio at the end of the spot. Whatever comes before it can change: a season, a special, a service people didn't know Dalworth offered. The jingle doesn't care what the spot is about. And because the frame is sound, it goes anywhere with a speaker: broadcast TV, radio, streaming TV, a podcast. A logo needs you to look at the screen. A jingle just needs you in the room.
It shows up in the numbers. By 2016, the one-van company had 141 employees, 106 vehicles, eight divisions and more than $21 million in expected sales, and it was still family-run. Smith gives the jingle credit for helping Dalworth stand out, but he's clear it isn't the whole story. The bigger difference, he says, is how they treat customers. That's the right order. The jingle gets you the call. The work gets you the next one.
The principle: your frame doesn't have to be a fictional town. It can be ten seconds and a phone number, as long as you stick with it.
What brand consistency looks like for a growing business in 2027
You don't need a fictional town or a former NFL linebacker. You need the right audience, the right places to reach them, one idea worth repeating, and a frame people recognize.
The rule hasn't changed since back when colleges still printed a weekly newspaper. Your customer now meets you on streaming TV, on Instagram, in a newsletter, on your Google profile and, more and more, inside an AI assistant's answer. Your frame has to survive the jump between every one of those channels.
The good news is that tools that used to belong to Dr Pepper now belong to you, too. Streaming TV can target a handful of zip codes. A regional publication's newsletter or a niche podcast can reach exactly the people your business wants. A 1988 jingle would work on every one of them, which tells you the frame matters more than the channel.
There's a 2027 bonus, too. A business that describes itself the same way everywhere, with a steady stream of content behind it, gives AI assistants a much clearer picture to work from when someone asks who to call. Consistency used to help people remember you. Now it may help the machines recommend you.
Nobody remembers the ad. Everybody remembers the town.
Here's what Dr Pepper actually did. It picked the right audience, in the right place, with an idea that was true to the brand. It stayed put long enough for recognition, familiarity and trust to stack up. It kept the frame and changed the message every single week. And it's getting paid for all of it.
None of that requires a national budget. Dalworth did it with $3,500 and a phone number. What it does require is deciding what your town is, and then having the nerve to live there for a while. That's the kind of big-brand thinking Future Days Media brings to growing businesses, sized for a real budget.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find out what's going on in Fansville this week.
Matt is the founder and brand strategy director of Future Days Media.
4. Sources Cited
Keurig Dr Pepper, "Fandom Never Sleeps: Dr Pepper Premieres Season 9 of Fansville" (Aug 27, 2026)
Marketing Dive, "How Dr Pepper's Fansville campaign stays relevant and drives outcomes" (Aug 27, 2026)
Forbes, "Lane Kiffin Stars in Fansville Season 9 From Dr Pepper" (Aug 27, 2026)
Forbes, "Dr Pepper Retiring Larry Culpepper and Launching Fansville This College Football Season" (Aug 2018)
Keurig Dr Pepper, Fansville Season 7 announcement (Aug 2024)
MediaPost, "Dr Pepper Takes Fansville Into The Great Unknown" (2024)
Sports Illustrated, "An NIL First: Clemson Quarterback D.J. Uiagalelei to Star in Dr Pepper National Ad Campaign" (Aug 2021)
MediaPost, "KDP's College Football-Themed Fansville Moves Toward Pro Town" (2025)
CNN via ABC7, "Dr Pepper passes Pepsi as second biggest soda brand behind Coke" (Beverage Digest data)
Marketing Dive, "How Dr Pepper passed Pepsi by marketing around football, flavor innovation" (June 2024)
Fort Worth Business Press, "A family affair: Customer service, commitment and vision drive Dalworth to success" (Nov 19, 2016)
Fort Worth Business Press, "In Market: Here's the dirt on that commercial" (Oct 14, 2016)
D Magazine, "Which is the Most Infectious Local Jingle of All Time?" (Jan 2017)
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