Creative Consultation, Design, and Art Direction, servicing Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, London

Summary


Background: Since early 2025 KDP knew that their hot beverage portfolio would require a global update to reflect changes in recycling communication. This update impacted product packaging, product renders, and all PDP creative representing nearly 50 brands and 280+ SKUs.

Leaders at KDP wanted to leverage the update to simultaneously address bottlenecks in product render production and PDP creative production by incorporating digital twin technology with a digital archive of revised digital shelf imagery and informational messaging so that updates to visuals across retailers could be generated by an agent through prompt alone.

The request


My role in this program: engineer a throughput that scaled to meet demand. This required a departure from legacy systems that, after testing, proved too fragile and costly.



Select featured brands impacted by QR1



Engineered to cascade


Critical to development was a re-framing of KDP’s communication strategy. Across all owned brands messaging skewed toward the aspirational. Competitor analysis and AB testing demonstrated that informational messaging delivered more impact and scored better for agentic match.

A three-tiered approach was developed that broke all PDP creative into brand, SKU, and item-level creative. Aspirational messaging was sequested to brand-level POAs, while informational messaging was concentrated within SKU and item-level POAs. This aligned with learnings gathered from competitor analysis.

The result was a modular hierarchy of messaging that was designed to cascade such that an item-level input would trigger upward toward SKU-level information and brand-level stories.


Data-to-delivery using this throughput reduced production costs from 6+ hours per SKU to 10-40 minutes per SKU




Production testing


A handful of select brands were chosen for development in early testing to demonstrate to stakeholders that the end-to-end process worked when manually driven. A production team was given workbooks completed by brand managers containing key data points about product offers, beverage characteristics, RTBs, and essentail branding elements (color, logo, brand story, etc.) This information was used to build a component library of PDP creative in which brands and SKUs were their own connected variants.

The process was timed through several builds under a variety of conditions. The efficiencies were clear: whereas legacy systems required up to 8 hours per SKU, end-to-end, this new throughput delivered creative within 60 minutes or less. 



Select featured brands demonstrating QR1 flexibility in handling different brands, skus, and beverage styles.








Testing scale


The next step was testing the throughput using a real program with a real deadline to market. The client also wanted to test for flexibility. 7UP’s 2026 “Flip the Sip” rebrand program was selected for this new process as it would depart from the hot beverage category and require adaptation to a variety of product packaging types, sizes, and the number of deliverables required would guarantee scalability. 










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