Daniel Birnbaum on SodaStream's Super Bowl Ad

From an advertising perspective, the Super Bowl is the world’s greatest stage. But our DNA has up till now been intentionally nontraditional. Guerrilla marketing, grass-roots tactics. We haven’t wanted to sound like just another soda brand, and anyway, there’s no way we could ever compete dollar for dollar with the big guys. The marketing budget of Coca-Cola is close to $12 billion a year, and ours is somewhere in the realm of $65 million, about a half-percent of theirs. So if we used the textbook they did, we’d be crushed.

We started to experiment with TV advertising earlier in 2012. It’s hard: Our category, home soda making, doesn’t exist. Not only do we have to say to consumers, “Hey, you can do this!” but then we have to tell them why they should. We came up with the SodaStream Effect ad campaign to try to get these ideas across—that we think we’re healthier, better for the environment, and cheaper than traditional sodas—all in 30 seconds. The spot has three different scenes of people using a SodaStream, and each time dramatically cuts to bottles evaporating, showing that you don’t need those bottles anymore. I think it works. We even got banned in England! The U.K. broadcasters have a group that censors advertising, and they decided our ad was telling consumers to save the environment instead of going to the supermarket. It’s so ridiculous.