Sprite Argentina Turns Pole Dancing Into a Masterclass in Staying Fresh
Sprite's "The Pole" is a 2019 Argentine film campaign created by Santo Buenos Aires that uses the composure of a world-champion male pole dancer absorbing online ridicule to embody the brand's enduring "I Love You, Haters" positioning and its seasonal rallying cry, "It's Haters Season. Stay Fresh."
Published in Argentina in March 2019, the campaign centres on a single film asset featuring Alberto del Campo, a Cirque du Soleil world-champion pole dancer, performing his craft while a voiceover delivers a volley of real-style online taunts and insults directed at him. Del Campo's unbroken poise under that verbal assault becomes the campaign's central argument: that genuine ability and self-possession are the only answers haters ever need. The work was created for Coca-Cola's Sprite brand by Santo, the Buenos Aires-based independent agency led creatively at the time by Maxi Itzkoff and Rafael Santamarina, whose names appear in the production credits for the campaign. The film was directed and choreographed by Jo Roy, according to adsoftheworld.com.
In Argentina, the campaign arrived at a moment when social media toxicity had become a broadly recognised cultural phenomenon, and when Sprite had already established "I Love You, Haters" as a platform with regional traction across Latin America. "The Pole" sharpened that platform by selecting a discipline — male pole dancing — that carries its own freight of cultural prejudice, making del Campo not simply a skilled athlete but a double target whose composure carries proportionally greater weight. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 67 out of 100, reflecting strong creative originality and awards recognition offset by the absence of verified consumer-effectiveness data in the public domain.
Sprite's "I Love You, Haters" platform addresses a documented shift in how younger consumers relate to online criticism. The platform positions the brand not as a beverage refreshing the body but as a cultural stance refreshing the mind — a distinction that gave Santo Buenos Aires considerable creative latitude in Argentina's competitive non-alcoholic drinks market.
The strategic logic behind "The Pole" rests on selecting a protagonist whose sport guarantees an outsized volume of unsolicited public opinion. Male pole dancing carries stigma in many Latin American cultural contexts, meaning Alberto del Campo faced a category of hostility that extends well beyond ordinary athletic criticism. By placing that specific athlete at the campaign's centre, Santo converted social prejudice into dramatic fuel, ensuring that the haters depicted in the film felt credible and culturally specific to Argentine and broader Ibero-American audiences rather than abstract or manufactured.
The global carbonated soft-drinks market was valued at approximately $284.9 billion in 2017, according to Research and Markets, with year-over-year growth of around one percent in that period — figures that confirm the category as mature and heavily contested. In that environment, brand meaning and cultural relevance function as primary competitive levers. Coca-Cola, Sprite's parent company, held approximately 53 percent of global CSD market share in 2017, according to Research and Markets, while PepsiCo held approximately 18 percent, according to the same source. Against that duopoly backdrop, Sprite's investment in provocative, values-led creative in Argentina reflects a deliberate effort to hold loyalty among younger consumers who regard inauthenticity as a disqualifying brand trait. The "Haters" platform — of which "The Pole" is a component — is precisely that kind of authenticity wager.
Jo Roy directed and choreographed "The Pole" for Sprite Argentina, according to adsoftheworld.com and the director's own professional résumé. The film's production integrates choreographic design and cinematographic framing so that del Campo's pole work reads as athletic argument rather than spectacle — each rotation and hold a measured, physical rebuttal to the insults layered over the soundtrack.
The creative direction, attributed to Santo Buenos Aires under the leadership of Maxi Itzkoff and Rafael Santamarina, constructs the film's emotional geometry around contrast: the ugliness of the voiceover text set against the discipline and beauty of the movement on screen. That structural contrast does the persuasive work without requiring a conventional advertising payoff. There is no product shot lingering on the bottle's condensation, no celebrity endorsement arc, no conventional resolution. The film ends with del Campo still performing, the haters still audible, and the tagline "It's Haters Season. Stay Fresh" arriving as an observation rather than a command — as reported by adage.com and dailyonline.it in their coverage of the campaign.
Ad Age selected the film as an Editor's Pick, describing it as the latest instalment of Sprite's "Haters" series and drawing attention to the specificity of the insults del Campo absorbs, according to Ad Age. The Drum also covered the work, noting the campaign's deployment of a culturally loaded subject as a vehicle for the brand's broader positioning, as reported by The Drum. Alberto del Campo's identity as a Cirque du Soleil world champion lends the film a layer of verified credential that prevents the narrative from reading as manufactured underdog mythology — he is, by external competitive measure, among the best in the world at what the haters mock.
No verified sales lift, market-share movement, brand-tracking data, or formal effectiveness measures for "The Pole" are publicly available. Assessment of the campaign's impact therefore rests on its awards record and structural creative analysis.
The awards record is substantial for a single-market film. "The Pole" won a Bronze Lion in the Film category at Cannes Lions 2019 for Santo Buenos Aires and Coca-Cola/Sprite Argentina, according to the Cannes Lions official record. The campaign also won Gold at the Argentine Creative Circle in 2019, according to the director's professional résumé. It won Gold Film at the Dossier Argentine Pencil in 2019, again according to the director's résumé. At Ojo de Iberoamérica 2019, the film won Silver in Film, according to the same source. The breadth of recognition — spanning the world's most prestigious advertising festival, Argentina's own industry awards, and the pan-regional Ibero-American competition — signals consistent peer-level validation across multiple juries applying different criteria.
Structurally, the film earns its effectiveness credentials through what it withholds as much as what it deploys. By refusing conventional product-centric closure and allowing the discomfort of the hater voiceover to persist into the final frames, the campaign creates an emotional residue that passive exposure to more polished advertising rarely achieves. As reported by bizcommunity.com and adsoftheworld.com in their coverage of the campaign, the film circulated meaningfully beyond Argentina's domestic market, reaching audiences across the Ibero-American region and earning editorial attention in international trade press — an organic distribution outcome that reflects creative specificity resonating across cultural borders.
"The Pole" is a 2019 Sprite film made by Santo Buenos Aires in Argentina. It features world-champion pole dancer Alberto del Campo performing while absorbing a stream of online insults, closing with the tagline "It's Haters Season. Stay Fresh" as part of Sprite's broader "I Love You, Haters" platform.
Jo Roy directed and choreographed "The Pole" for Sprite Argentina, according to adsoftheworld.com and the director's professional résumé. The campaign was created by Santo Buenos Aires under the creative leadership of Maxi Itzkoff and Rafael Santamarina, and stars Alberto del Campo, a Cirque du Soleil world champion in pole dancing.
"The Pole" won a Bronze Lion in the Film category at Cannes Lions 2019, according to the official Cannes Lions record. The campaign also won Gold at the Argentine Creative Circle, Gold Film at the Dossier Argentine Pencil, and Silver Film at Ojo de Iberoamérica 2019, according to the director's professional résumé.
"The Pole" argues that composure and genuine ability are the only necessary responses to online hatred. Set within Sprite's "I Love You, Haters" platform, the film uses Alberto del Campo's unbroken poise while absorbing ridicule — as reported by Ad Age and dailyonline.it — to make staying fresh a physical and psychological act simultaneously.
No verified sales lift, market-share change, or formal effectiveness data for "The Pole" is publicly available. The campaign's documented impact is awards-based: a Cannes Lions Bronze, two Argentine Gold awards, and a Silver at Ojo de Iberoamérica in 2019, according to Cannes Lions records and the director's professional résumé.
"The Pole" forms part of Sprite's established "I Love You, Haters" platform, which positions the brand as a cultural endorsement of self-possession under criticism. As reported by adsoftheworld.com and adage.com, the 2019 Argentine film extends that platform by selecting a protagonist whose sport carries cultural stigma, amplifying the campaign's emotional and strategic stakes.
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