How Poppi’s Super Bowl vending machine campaign spiraled out of control

It’s a soda brand popularity contest, and we’re all here to bear witness.

This year, prebiotic soda brand Poppi ran its second consecutive Super Bowl ad featuring influencers like Jake Shane and Alix Earle. But it wasn’t the creator campaign on the big screen that got people talking as much as the one online.

Ahead of the game, Poppi sent enormous pink vending machines to 32 creators and “fans of the brand” in NFL team cities, as well as The Boot bar in New Orleans. Recipients began posting videos of the machines, and mayhem ensued: some consumers expressed anger at Poppi for sending free products to “rich people,” while others bemoaned the message it sent to fans of the brand and smaller creators. “When it gets too extravagant…it just feels very out of touch,” creator Isabella Lanter said in a TikTok video response to the campaign.

All the while, fellow prebiotic soda brand Olipop, which did not run a Super Bowl ad, jumped on the opportunity to respond to comments, speculate on the cost of the vending machines, and even mail out Super Bowl-themed gifts. One comment from Olipop read, “For the record, those machines cost $25K each lol,” while a post on X said, “We don’t have vending machines, but who wants a jersey!!”

Allison Ellsworth, founder of Poppi, told Marketing Brew that the soda brand is now aiming to correct some of the information about how much it spent on its Super Bowl campaign, all while aiming to remain “above the fray” and figure out the best way to market Poppi moving forward.

“Hindsight is 20/20,” Ellsworth said. “The internet’s an interesting place where nobody ever knows what’s going to happen.”

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Farial Moss, Poppi’s director of PR and communications, said the goal of sending the vending machines was to stand out as a Super Bowl advertiser. “If you’re going to launch something, you have to make a splash or nobody knows about it,” she said.

And make a splash it did. Many of the original creator videos generated millions of views and thousands of comments, and Ellsworth said that for the first few days of the campaign, “the sentiment was incredible.” As conversation grew, Olipop and other brands like Wendy’s began to chime in amid the criticism. In negative posts about Poppi across social media, Olipop’s official account could be found stoking the fire.

On one TikTok video, Olipop speculated on how much Poppi spent on its Super Bowl ad (“it’s $8M per 30 seconds, and it was a 60-second ad sooo….”), and in another, it made the claim about the cost of the vending machines.

Ellsworth said Poppi did not spend $16 million on its Super Bowl ad and spent the same amount as brands like Dorito’s and T-Mobile (although she declined to share the exact dollar figure.) She also said the supposed $25,000 price tag was “inflated by 60%.”

“We probably spent the least of any of those [Super Bowl advertisers] as far as marketing, is what people don’t get,” Ellsworth said. “The competitor [sharing] misinformation and bullying us online definitely played into it.”

Olipop declined to comment, telling Marketing Brew in an email that the brand will “let the consumers lead the conversation from here."

Earlier this week, Ellsworth took to TikTok in an effort to set the record straight. The response was also met with more pushback. One criticism of the campaign that came up repeatedly was that Poppi’s vending machines should have been placed in locations like hospital break rooms or Title I schools, not sent to influencers.

“We actually do a lot of that type of stuff,” Ellsworth said. “But that’s not marketing.”

According to Ellsworth, Poppi donated more than 3.4 million cans last year to “various organizations, nonprofits, schools, and events,” and she noted that creator Avery Woods received her vending machine at a party of first responders. “We don’t talk about it because I’ve always been one of those people who [says], ’If you’re gonna do it, do it and don’t get the accolades because then you’re not doing it through the right lens,’” she said.

The plan was always for Poppi to take the vending machines back and redeploy them in future campaigns and giveaways over the next few years, Ellsworth said, not let influencers hold onto them forever.

“Nobody wants a big vending machine in their house,” she said.

Ellsworth said she is unsure how to send machines to some pre-planned post-Super Bowl locations without it garnering additional scrutiny. “I don’t think now I’ll want to overcorrect and scream it from the rooftops,” she said.

In a comment on Ellsworth’s response video, Poppi said it would drop off a machine at a hospital the Wednesday following the Super Bowl. Moss confirmed that so far, the machines have been sent to a fire station in Los Angeles, an elementary school in Phoenix, a community baseball and softball training center in Nashville, and a community center in Dallas.

Can it?

From the outside, not everyone is convinced that the flack around the vending machines was warranted. “High investment has always been a theme in the Super Bowl, regardless of whether it’s going to influencers or something else,” Kelsey Chickering, principal analyst at Forrester, told us.

Creator Hank Green posted his own TikTok in response to the saga, suggesting that soda brands “don’t need to be messy in people’s comments,” while creator and branding expert Ashwinn Krishnaswamy called it a win for both Poppi and Olipop considering the outsize attention both brands received.

Social strategist Rachel Karten disagreed, comparing the vending machine stunt to influencer trips from the makeup brand Tarte because consumers were able to estimate (and therefore judge) the brand’s overall campaign spend. “Good marketing doesn’t exist in the context of bad sentiment,” she wrote in her newsletter “Link in Bio.”

Morgan Zanotti, the co-founder of the condiments brand Primal Kitchen, said in a TikTok video that it can be difficult for a brand to market itself to younger consumers. Many of them, she said, “want to have the money, but [they] don’t want to see people have the money.”

Ellsworth said Poppi is taking the whole situation as a learning opportunity.

“It’s okay if people don’t understand the marketing side of it, because it is a lot of money,” she said. “I hear it and if we were tone deaf, we’ll own it and get better.”