So, Lisa, my partner here at FU, as well as my great friend of many years, sent me this article: The post explains how Morning Consult reports that while 2026 was a hard year for brand growth, a newly revamped Mr. Pibb soda was the fastest-growing brand of the year.
If you didn’t know (and if you live in places like New Jersey, you wouldn’t have seen this happening across your grocery store shelves), late in 2025, Coca-Cola, makers of Mr. Pibb, rolled out a new-and-improved version of the soda. The new version contains more caffeine, the packaging has a new look, and in less than a year, the 54-year-old brand has nabbed the top spot on Morning Consult’s annual Fastest Growing Brands report.
“Ralph, it’s only soda,” I hear you say. But the reason Lisa sent me the article and why I hold any good news about Mr. Pibb so close to my heart (as does my buddy Bob, another devotee of Mr. Pibb and the only other person I knew who celebrated the relaunch with the same fervor as I) is that Lisa knows how much I love Mr. Pibb.
And on one of our trips, she saw firsthand how important it is to me.
It’s 2009. Lisa, always the entrepreneurial type, and holding a degree and all kinds of smarts, married her interest in what was happening on the net to grow a pretty healthy client base offering various forms of online marketing. This year shy of the new decade, my twenty-year-old job was ending, I was still righting my way from a divorce, and although things were not terrible, I was floundering a bit; certainly, in where my career might be going. I really wanted to give writing and music a full-time go, and Lisa, a great friend to me for years, asked me to help her write some web copy. A fast study as she was, she taught me as much about SEO keywords and what was happening on the net and what her clients were looking for, employing me to scribble some copy (we lost touch during my marriage, so it really was so great to be back in touch with such a great friend!)
Lisa also knew that in my part-time writing career I had scored some credits in the ‘adult space,’ landing some erotic fiction in a few magazines and scoring a few interviews with some interesting folk. And smart as she was/is, Lisa figured, why not try to infiltrate the adult business market, since adult content was taking off across the net and the companies in the game would need online marketing as much as any ‘mainstream’ company.
Yup, I decided to be the “Adult businesses need SEO too” SEO marketer and, in early 2009, was invited to speak at AVN on a panel. I later found myself speaking there in some Vice documentary as we were scrolling through TV channels and I heard my voice and saw my husband in the crowd from that appearance (look up AVN if you are of a mind). But at this show Ralph is referencing later in 2009, we met the YNOT crew in San Francisco.
So, Lisa and I found ourselves at the YNOT convention in June of that year, hanging with the creators, advertisers, and owners of adult websites, in the hilly city by the bay.
So much fun stuff went down that long weekend, least of which was getting to hang with my bestie. We celebrated her birthday with a big hot fudge sundae each at the ironic San Francisco shop, Ghirardelli. We ate lots of Trader Joe’s gluten-free cookies. We hit the park. We were introduced to Peete’s Coffee. Lisa gave a great talk (during which we all learned that Michael Jackson, as well as Farrah Fawcett, had just died) as some small dog that was hiding under a chair came out and started barking at me in the middle of my session. We hung with and met lots of people in the business we had never met, like Airforce Amy, of H.B.O.’s “Cathouse” fame, made some fast friends, and during the night had a troll around at the night spots the YNOT head honchos had set up for the convention attendees, all free of charge.
Two of those places were strip clubs in the city, connected for us by a free van ride whenever we wished. Lisa, me, and two friends we had met at the convention took off one night to first hit the Hustler club and then an all-nude strip club in the Tenderloin section of the city. I have never been a true denizen of strip clubs, and I can’t even say for sure if Lisa had ever been to one. I have been; where I’ve never been to was an S&M dungeon…but that’s a story for another day.
Sure, up to that point I had been to a couple in my life, but as I never drank, sitting around a bar and having a few pops, watching girls gyrate wearing G-strings and sexy bras just never did it for me.
But when it’s San Francisco and all that…
We hit the Hustler club, stayed a half hour, enjoyed the well-proportioned ladies there, then took to the van to have the driver spirit us to the all-nude club across town. Now, as was/is true in New Jersey, it was/is in San Francisco; an all-nude strip club does not serve alcohol. What does happen is that you pay your cover charge to enter the club (which, as I say, the YNOT-ers had taken care of for us all this night) and you are given a big plastic cup to use for however much soda or juice you might want to pull from the club’s drink dispensers.
Now, remember, Lisa knows me well; she knows how much I love Mr. Pibb and she also knows how nearly impossible it is to find the soda on the Upper East Side where we both lived at the time. And she also knows how I can kind of spin my mental wheels over things other people may not.
Hell, she is kind of the same way. I guess this is why we have been friends for so long; in a word, we can both be true dorks when it comes to some stuff.
If there were rollerbladers or a baseball game, I would have been fixated on these.
Into the all-nude club, we go and are handed our plastic cups.
The place was huge, littered with low tables and low-lit cubbies where who-knows-what was happening. There was a low main stage sitting as pretty much the centerpiece of the place, as yes, a goodly amount of ladies were stepping around the low carpet in heels…wearing nothing else (hence, the ‘all-nude’ tag). One could, and plenty of men were, sit pretty much at the lip of the stage, look up from their low tables and enjoy a view better than everyday gynecologists are treated to.
You get the picture, right?
But just inside the lip (sorry for the use of the word ‘lip’ at this stage of the game) of the main entrance, just as the four of us were getting a good whiff of glitter and desperation, stood one of the club’s soda dispensers. Need I tell you what soda was freely on hand?
I freak. I cried out. I almost fell to my knees like a religious worshipper of sticky soda syrup. And I turned to Lisa and squealed, “Lisa, look, they have Mr. Pibb, they have Mr. Pibb,” to which my bestest buddy, one of the people I knew who can land a snappier rejoinder faster than most, and as much a doofus when it comes to the stuff she goons over, said:
“All this naked female flesh walking around you, and you are freaking out over the soda. You are such a dork!”
So, there we are standing in this “club,” where honestly most of the men we spied didn’t seem all that very interested and hung by the soda machine and shot the shit. I think we were all a bit concerned about sitting anywhere. There was one guy who was really into the girls, but otherwise I think we got into a convo about Mr. Pibb and probably made fun of the few men who were salivating over these girls who really didn’t look so interested in being on stage or walking around.
At the time, we didn’t know that Mr. Pibb would become an ongoing thing in our lives, but sure enough, when I see Mr. Pibb in the supermarket, I take a picture and send it to Ralph. It’s one of the many ongoing bonds we share.
I’m sure more stories will come out as the site continues to grow, but yeah, Ralph, Mr. Pibb, then naked girls, he and I at an adult business convention…happy times.
Mr. Pibb, good friends (Friday nights); can’t beat it!
