Soda Stream Case Banned Commercial

Universidad de Especialidades Espíritu Santo

Facultad de ICP

Distribution Channels

Name: Ivette Ortiz

Date: 24 - Sept - 2014

SodaStream's CEO on Turning a Banned Super Bowl Ad into Marketing Gold

Soda Stream is a Company that was near bankruptcy when Birnbaum joined it, in 2007. Birnbaum was an expert in marketing and he graduated on Harvard Business School. Until 2007 he was the president of Nike´s Business in Israel, but the his friend Yuval Cohen bought a Company named Soda Stream and asked him to become his CEO.

Birnbaum thought that joining SodaStream was a very difficult challenge, but he was really optimistic and decided to took the challenge. For this, he hired a hole team of specialists to become their working group and decided to promote Soda Stream in many different ways. His major idea was to promote the Company during the American Super Bowl wich is a very important event where millions of americans and people over the world wacht it.

At first Gerard Meyer, who runs SodaStream's U.S. business joked about the idea of advertising during the Super Bowl, but finally in 2012 he actually thought that this was a very good idea, so SodaStream started looking over numbers and realized that the campaign was going to cost about 4 million dollars. But for the SodaStream team this doesn´t sound bad at all, for them this was a good investment.

Immediately Birnbaum got in touch with Alex Bogusky, the brilliant creative who'd done their past ads, to make this new ad. So Alex create a spot called "Game Changer” which was an ad that directly affect to Coke and Pepsi beacuse the ad would show Coke and Pepsi trucks pulling up in front of a supermarket. But when CBS network executives saw the storyboards, they objected because they said that SodaStream were mocking the truck drivers.

SodaStream contact specialized lawyers to support them in the case that CBS didnt air it. But finally CBS rejected their ad because it criticized Coke and Pepsi, which...