High Performance Tastes Like a Memory

Everyone has a memory attached to orange soda. Not the drink so much as the moment – an open fire hydrant down the block in July, or the cans someone’s mom hands you out of a cooler right after practice.

Cadence has spent the last few years establishing itself as the serious option, with its sponsorship of Olympic athletes and high-performance formulas. Its newest flavor started, instead, with a memory: a long run through Manhattan that ended with Ross MacKay and Alex Lopez in a bodega, shirts off, looking for anything cold.

For a brand built for the goal-oriented individual, that choice is deliberate: a serious performance drink that doesn't have to look, sound, or taste like one.

“Performance brands have made performance feel like punishment,” Ross Mackay, Cadence’s founder, says. “Blue raspberry, sour green apple – names that sound like they were generated by a committee trying to sound ‘athletic.’ We work with Olympic athletes, and none of them were thinking about electrolytes when they were kids running around in the summer. They're thinking about the soda their dad let them have after the game."

For Ross, that memory matters more than anything on the label. "I think about my own kid and what she's going to remember — not the macros, not the ingredient panel, but the feeling," he says. "We wanted to make the orange soda you remember, the one from the cookout — but built the way we build everything.”

That idea shaped the campaign from the beginning. No running is explicitly shown — a small touch that is part of a larger point Alex and Ross keep making: Cadence is widening its definition of who performance belongs to. “Someone picking up an orange soda after their first 5K, the same way an Olympian grabs one after a session,” Ross says. “It doesn't matter if that's a marathon or a pickup game or just showing up for yourself in the morning. It’s for anyone who sweats for something.”

The campaign was born from a memory. Last summer, living and training together in Brooklyn, Ross and Alex found themselves in the middle of a heat wave — fire hydrants open, kids flooding the streets, everyone outside. The creative direction became obvious. Alex, Cadence's creative director, took that summer and began building the world around it.

“When it comes to the can, it gives us the ability to flex into a world-building mindset,” Alex says. “With each flavor, we lean into world-building and base it off the flavor itself. Cream soda, cola, now orange soda – they're very nostalgic." 

"I'm so tired of seeing someone running, and when they get tired, they open up a can," Alex says. "We want to give people more of an emotion than just a pretty person running."

The team leaned into that same impulse when it came time to shoot the campaign, capturing the feelings of a lived-in memory rather than a polished ad – the kind of familiar, ordinary moments that anyone would recognize and relate to. Alex worked with Ryan Golz and Mason Prendergast to bring this vision to life, shooting the campaign on 120 and 35mm film, with little digital backup. 

"The first thing that comes to mind is nostalgia. What medium would enhance that idea? Shooting on film was the first thought," Alex says. It’s also a departure from how the rest of the performance space tends to work. "We're taking more creative risks. When we got the film back, it was like Christmas. It's such a slow process, you can't rush it."

“It’s an ode to New York. It’s all real people. We’re trying to do it justice, not fake it,” Alex says.

Cadence is also opening a performance center in Los Angeles, marking the brand’s first time having a physical home. Ross describes it as somewhere between a training space and a proof of concept.

"It's the place where everything we say online becomes something you can walk into. Training space, recovery space, product on the shelf," he says. "It's the difference between telling people what Cadence is and letting them stand inside it. It's been a dream of mine to build something like this." 

The goal, whether it's a can, a campaign, or a physical space, has always been the same: make something people remember.

“If we do our job right,” Ross says, “in ten years someone's orange soda memory just happens to be ours."

Words by: Christina Lai

Images & videos courtesy of: Cadence, Alex Lopez, Ryan Golz, Mason Prendergast