My Art On A Jones Soda Label! Achievement Unlocked!
When I was a kid, my room was decorated with Coca-Cola memorabilia & antiques and I wanted to write Coke ads when I grew up. Not only did I love the product, but I loved Coke’s rich history and classic advertising. They were the reason Santa wore red, after all! So, when I got a little older, I decided to go to college for advertising. That’s when I discovered Jones Soda.
At the end of year 2, you had to spend the whole semester creating a big ad campaign with full media support for any brand you like, then present it to your teachers at the end, as if you were an ad agency pitching it to Jones Soda themselves. Coke was too intimidating, so it was never on the table, and despite many warnings from my teachers that soda brands were hard mode even for professionals, I chose Jones Soda. I loved the product, the brand, and the fact that they were an icon at the time, even though they’d never done any sort of traditional ad campaign before. It seemed like the perfect fit for me, and it was! My teachers signed off on it and I got to work.
Part of creating an ad campaign is becoming immersed in the brand, very much like actors with “method acting”. You drink it, you live it, you breathe it, you think it, is sort of how it goes. At an ad agency, they would have a big creative meeting with product and swag for the team working on the campaign, and even switch all the pop sold in the building from whatever brand they were to whatever the new brand is. Then the creative team would probably be flown somewhere and given a tour of the plant making the product, among other expensive experiences and big deal orientation type stuff.
Being a single mom on OSAP, with one Jones Soda costing almost a full $1 more than any other pop brand due to the glass bottles, my options were pretty limited to do the same kind of things for myself. Part of the assignment was to write to the company to request a media kit to get what official info we could, and when I did, I told them all about myself, my lifelong obsession with pop advertising in particular, what I was doing and why I chose them. I included my snail mail address.
Then about a month later, a big box was dropped off at my doorstep containing the nicest Jones Soda swag items, along with their media kit, and a note from someone there wishing me luck on my campaign! There was a pair of orange coveralls with a Jones Soda embroidered patch on the left breast, a toque, a metal lunch box, promotional CDs of tiny bands that they sponsored, a few posters with labels tiled on them, and a million stickers and buttons. The crown jewel in the bounty was a cool black, plastic lightbox, with an illuminated Jones logo across the top and a clear plexiglass front, that lit up 5 coloured bottles of soda. They essentially spoiled me!
The day I presented my campaign to my teachers and a peanut gallery of interested student spectators, I wore pigtails, the toque and the coveralls, and set up all the Jones collectibles behind me. I had poster-sized versions of my print ads, and a prototype of the Jones Soda disposable film camera I’d made. My campaign was centered around having a small presence with a big impact at Warped Tour, which was still relatively small itself at the time, and handing out disposable cameras people could drop off at the end of the day or send in to be developed and the pics potentially on labels. I got applause and whistles from the drop-in student audience at the end of my presentation, and ended up nailing the assignment.
Ever since, I’ve been what ad people call a “brand loyal”. Jones was pretty good to me. I’m a type 1 diabetic and can’t drink it anymore, but I still love their labels, they still don’t advertise, and because of that, I still think the brand is one of the coolest.
One night about 3 months ago, I was on the Jones Soda website looking at their advent calendar of special edition Christmas-themed Jones Soda. It was about 3am and I was about to log out of work for the night and go to bed. I decided, just on a whim, to submit 3 or 4 photos I took, to be considered for official Jones Soda labels. Then I passed out and forgot all about it, didn’t even mention it to Harry the next day. I just figured it was so unlikely I’d get picked, there was no point in even thinking about it again. Like yeah, right.
Then last night after dinner, I got an e-mail from the Jones Soda Photo Label Team, saying congratulations and that they’d chosen my photo to be on bottles of Blue Bubblegum! I wondered what the hell photo would I have submitted, that they would actually choose? I had no idea and only vaguely remembered even submitting anything! Luckily, they linked to the photo in their gallery, so I could see that it was this one, from the “Pink Purge” shoot I did in October with Brandy (right) and Ashley (left):
I had to read the e-mail a few times to make sure I was understanding correctly because Jones also sells cases of custom bottles to anyone who wants to upload their own photo, that are not for sale in stores, and say “My Jones” in the corner very obviously. Ours are actually official and will be for sale in stores! Holy crap! What an honour!
They said they’d send me a paper copy in the mail if I gave them my address, so I did and asked for 3 copies if possible, so we could each have one. They wrote back saying no, only one is available for some reason, but they sent me this render of what the label will look like:
I’d forgotten that 95% of Jones Soda labels were in black & white, which sucks when you have a pink-themed photo, but then I noticed the prominent QR code on the right, which I think goes to the photo’s page in their gallery where you can see it in full colour and apparently even vote on it. The photo had 0 votes when I first looked at it last night, but I’ve since shown people the link (that doesn’t seem to work anymore) and it has 3 now. I’m not sure what happens if you get a lot of votes since we were chosen before there were any! Maybe it means they just liked us enough to put on the label!
Either way, being on a Jones Soda label is a massive honour for me and was definitely on my bucket list. My full name and town is even on it! And my mom even bragged about it to her friends! I’m pretty sure if/when I see one in the wild, I will for sure burst into tears of joy. Thank you to Brandy and Ashley for all of this. 🙏🥰 We’re gonna be famous for being weird!
To see all the photos from our “Pink Purge” shoot, click here!
