A video of a man drinking a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice while skateboarding to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” went mega-viral on TikTok in the early days of the pandemic. That thrust the 100-year-old cranberry company into the spotlight—and into the thick of a new social app that companies were just starting to experiment on.
Ocean Spray’s immediate response was CEO Tom Hayes hopping on a skateboard to recreate the moment. In the long-term, the situation “forced us to reevaluate how we go out into the world as a brand and figure out how to make Ocean Spray relevant,” Eliza Sadler, head of brand elevation, told us on stage at Sundance Film Festival over the weekend.
A big part of Ocean Spray’s strategy now is to monitor conversations happening on social media that they can participate in, ranging from high-fiber diets to UTIs. Those conversations also inform the company’s broader brand strategy, from what it posts on its own social media accounts to packaging for its products.
“A lot of where we’ve shifted our approach is that what’s happening on social is now the brief for the business,” Sadler said.
Every week, Ocean Spray assembles a team for a “writer’s room” meeting. The group brainstorms marketing ideas from content they’ve seen online, such as recipes that require cranberries or comments on social media like “Ocean Spray is the Nick Cannon of juices.” (If you don’t immediately get the reference to Cannon’s many children, Ocean Spray has a whopping 70 juice flavors.)
Legal is always in the writer’s room. Sometimes, they’re even in on the joke.
Last year, Ocean Spray posted a TikTok video of a boat in the ocean with the text “The summer I got four UTIs.” The video played off a trend sparked by a new season of Amazon Prime’s “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and the fact that UTIs are one of the most common reasons why people buy cranberry juice. Its posts about UTIs included health disclaimers preceded by “legal made us say this.”
Another example: When its team saw that “fibermaxxing,” or a high-fiber diet was trending, it turned around a campaign both online and in stores playing off the diet name, using fiber-rich Craisins. But it also had to check in with its legal team—to make sure people didn’t overdo it with how many cranberry raisins they ate.
The shock value is part of why the strategy works. “That is the content that performs the best,” Shanna Polesovsky, director of brand strategy and design at Ocean Spray said. “It’s that relatable thing that people are like, ‘No duh, why wouldn’t they be saying it?’ But they can’t believe we’re saying it at the same time.”
Still, translating brand affinity into real business outcomes remains a challenge. Ocean Spray focuses on metrics like saves and shares to measure engagement and tries to find ways to marry that with commercial metrics, like the percentage of homes that use or have its product. “There’s never a super clear formula,” Sadler said.
Ocean Spray also has to balance speaking to its loyal customers who are drinking diet cranberry juice and spending most of their time on Facebook, while also bringing in younger generations who are more likely to know the brand from that skateboarding video. “It’s a very broad spectrum of who we’re talking to and how we’re talking to them,” she added.
Unlike many other legacy brands, Ocean Spray is privately owned with a lean team that isn’t subject to shareholder demands, allowing it to experiment and move fast. They also have support from the C-Suite, meaning that there are fewer hoops to jump through. “You can’t do it if you don’t have buy-in from the top down,” Polesovsky said.
It helps that the brand has all but abandoned traditional TV, where it’s harder to get away with tongue-in-cheek or risky content. Now, 90% of Ocean Spray’s ad dollars are spent on non-linear TV, social and digital. “We have consciously moved [budget] every single year and chipped away at creating more social-first creator content,” Sadler said.
That includes working with both Hollywood stars and smaller creators.
Ocean Spray’s latest big holiday campaign, which launched across social media and streaming TV in late 2025, featured actor Bryan Cranston. In the campaign, Cranston plays a holiday cranberry thief named “Cranpus” and quips that “this year is ‘cranceled’” as he runs off with bags of Ocean Spray cranberries. One of the spots has more than 9.7 million views on YouTube.
Around the same time, Ocean Spray also invited 12 creators to a harvest celebration called “Bog Day,” referring to the wetlands in which cranberries grow. The company said all of the invitees were smaller creators who loved the brand.
“Sometimes that works hardest for us because it’s not manufactured, we’re not dictating what they say or don’t say. We just invite them into our world and let them tell those stories,” Sadler said.
