Sprite built a well-made piece of web design for a soda ad, worth the four minutes, even if the quiz at the end oversells itself.
The can was sitting in a cooler at my brother-in-law's place and I only scanned the QR code on the side of it because the wifi was slow and I'd run out of things to poke at. Everything about that setup had me braced for the usual four-second redirect into a sweepstakes form, the kind that wants your postcode before it wants anything else, so when I opened it and Sprite.com/zerolimits spent a moment loading properly I assumed something had gone wrong. What came up was the Hall of Zero Limits, a fully rendered 3D space somewhere between a museum and a research lab, built to promote Marvel Studios' Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, with a narrator standing there waiting to walk me through it.
The art direction is Afrofuturism crossed with Art Deco, holographic panels and gold trim over dark backgrounds, with a custom typeface built to look Wakandan and given its own transition animations, and none of it reads like a bought template reskinned for a soda campaign. Convincing gold and metal in real-time WebGL has been a hard rendering problem for years, so I spent a while clicking around the hall at deliberately awkward angles trying to catch the reflections cheating, and they don't cheat, because the team built their own HDRIs, full 360-degree lighting maps, purely to get that one thing right. The plants and statues and a lemon tree tucked into one corner clearly started life as sketches and DALL-E concept renders before being rebuilt properly in 3D, which is a corporate-budget use of AI art as a starting point rather than a finished product, a full year before everyone was arguing about it. I looked at that lemon tree for a lot longer than any reasonable person should. It isn't clickable, the narrator never mentions it, and as far as I can tell somebody on the team just decided the hall needed one, which is the detail that convinced me actual people cared about this thing rather than a media agency signing off a deliverable.
“1.75 million people turned up off the back of a QR code on a can, and stayed better than four minutes.”
The quiz at the end promises to reveal your creative gifts and gives you the horoscope treatment instead, a handful of encouraging outcomes shuffled around so that more or less anybody ends up being told they have a knack for storytelling, mine included.
The narrator, called the Wisdom Guide, paces the visit rather than talking over whatever you're already looking at, and it walks you to the Origin Stories, short interviews with the BIPOC creatives, several of them women, who worked on the film. Those would hold up with the Sprite branding stripped off entirely, though I couldn't work out whether they were shot for this site or cut down from press material Marvel already had, and nothing on the page says either way. A company selling flavored soda water paid for a site framed around empowering young Black creators, and 1.75 million people turned up and stayed better than four minutes, which is a long time to hold anyone off the back of a drinks can. Whether any of them left thinking harder about the creators the campaign says it's championing is a seperate question, and the dwell time doesn't answer it, and I don't think the site was ever built to.