What Poppi and Olipop's Rivalry Teaches Sparkling Water Brands About Creator Risk

Few CPG categories have had their creator marketing strategy stress-tested as publicly as functional soda. Poppi and Olipop didn't just build large businesses through creator content, they had a real, visible rivalry play out through it, including one campaign that became a cautionary tale worth understanding before any brand in this category writes its own brief. This is a category where the playbook already has documented wins and documented failures. Both are worth studying.

[IMAGE: Jupiter Creator Network screenshot showing TikTok food creators with avg views, CPM, engagement rate, and content interest tags. Alt text: "creator selection for sparkling water influencer marketing campaigns"]

Why sparkling water and functional soda need a category-specific playbook

The category's growth has been real and fast. PepsiCo's acquisition of Poppi for close to two billion dollars, and Olipop's own valuation reaching a similar range in its latest funding round, signal how seriously major beverage companies now take what was, a decade ago, a niche prebiotic experiment. Coca-Cola's entry with Simply Pop and Pepsi's own prebiotic cola confirm the category has moved from disruptive challenger space to something incumbents are racing to defend.

But the category's creator marketing history includes a genuinely useful cautionary example. Ahead of a Super Bowl ad in early 2025, Poppi sent branded vending machines to a group of already-prominent influencers as part of its pre-game campaign. The influencers posted about the gifts, the posts got millions of views, and the public reaction was sharply negative. Critics called it tone-deaf, pointing out that the machines went to wealthy creators rather than to places like hospitals, schools, or community centers where the gesture might have actually mattered. Olipop, a direct competitor, amplified the criticism in real time by commenting on the viral posts and inflating cost estimates, turning a competitor's misstep into free positioning for itself as the more grounded, accessible alternative.

The lesson isn't that influencer marketing failed here. The campaign generated enormous reach. The lesson is that scale and visibility can work against a brand when the optics of a creator activation don't match the audience's expectations of the brand, especially in a category where authenticity and accessibility are core to the pitch in the first place. For the overlapping gut-health casting pool, see the kombucha influencer marketing playbook.

Creator selection for sparkling water and functional soda campaigns

Gut health and wellness creators remain a strong core casting pool, the same audience relevant to kombucha, since prebiotic and functional soda brands compete for attention in much of the same content space. A creator already producing #GutTok-adjacent content brings a built-in audience primed to care about fiber content, gut microbiome benefits, and reduced-sugar positioning.

Given the category's documented sensitivity around scale and optics, mid-tier and smaller creators deserve real consideration here, not just as a budget lever but as a genuine risk-management choice. A large, highly visible activation aimed at already-prominent creators carries real reputational exposure if it reads as excessive or disconnected from the brand's everyday customer, exactly what happened in the vending machine campaign. A roster weighted toward creators whose audience relationship feels more accessible and less spectacle-driven reduces that specific risk while often delivering stronger per-dollar engagement anyway.

Soda-alternative and "cutting back on sugar" creators, people documenting a broader shift away from traditional soft drinks, are a third relevant pool, since much of this category's growth comes from consumers actively trying to reduce sugar rather than from consumers new to soda altogether.

Content and brief strategy for sparkling water and functional soda content

Brief creators around honest, specific claims, and stay disciplined about it. This category has already seen what happens when marketing claims outrun the science: Poppi's gut-health positioning drew a class-action lawsuit that ultimately settled for $8.9 million, centered on the argument that a single can's fiber content couldn't support the broader gut-health claims in its marketing. That's not a hypothetical risk, it's a documented outcome in this exact category, and it should shape every claim in every creator brief.

The safest and most defensible framing is comparative and factual: a can with meaningfully less sugar than a traditional soda, and a specific, real fiber or prebiotic content number, rather than broad claims about gut health outcomes or microbiome transformation. Creators should be briefed to share personal preference and experience rather than asserting health outcomes the product hasn't been clinically proven to deliver at the dose contained in a single can.

Where a brand has a genuine formulation edge, higher fiber content, a specific and well-sourced prebiotic ingredient, that specific, factual detail is a stronger and safer brief anchor than a general gut-health claim, and it also happens to be more differentiating content, since "look at this exact number" reads as more credible to an increasingly claims-skeptical audience than "this is good for your gut."

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Timing and scale considerations for sparkling water campaigns

Major cultural moments like the Super Bowl carry real upside for visibility but also carry the specific risk this category has already seen play out publicly. A brand considering a high-visibility, high-scale creator activation around a major moment should stress-test the campaign concept against exactly the criticism Poppi received: does this read as generous and connected to real customers, or does it read as spectacle aimed at an audience that's already well-resourced. That single gut check would have changed the outcome of the campaign that became this category's most visible case study.

Smaller, more consistent creator activity across the year, rather than one enormous, high-risk moment, is a lower-variance strategy that still builds category presence without the same exposure to a single viral misstep becoming the defining story of a campaign.

Attribution for sparkling water and functional soda campaigns

Standard engagement and impression tracking applies, with comment sentiment worth monitoring closely given this category's documented history of fast-moving public reaction, both positive and negative. A brand running any large-scale creator activation in this space should have a plan for monitoring sentiment in near real time, not just after the fact.

Where the brand's distribution includes Instacart-covered retailers, the standard comment-to-cart mechanic applies well. Standard food CPG creator campaign CPM, $1.25 to $12.67 depending on category and structure, applies to sparkling water and functional soda campaigns as well. Full category and platform context lives in the 2026 food CPG influencer benchmark.

Planning a high-visibility creator moment in a category that's already had a viral misstep?

Scale and optics matter as much as reach in this specific category. Get the creator mix and claims right before you launch.

Build Your Campaign the Right Way

How Jupiter handles sparkling water and functional soda influencer marketing for CPG

Jupiter's creator network is filterable by content interest, making it possible to build a roster around gut-health and better-for-you creators at a range of tiers, rather than defaulting to a small number of highly visible names whose scale can create exactly the optics risk this category has already experienced. The optimizer's 12 signals help balance reach against a creator mix that fits the brand's actual customer base.

Campaign budgets for a sparkling water or functional soda launch fall within the same $1.25 to $12.67 CPM benchmark range that applies across food CPG creator campaigns, and a more distributed, mid-tier-weighted roster is often the more defensible structure for this specific category given its documented sensitivity to scale and optics.

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See how Jupiter builds a claims-safe, appropriately scaled creator roster for your next sparkling water campaign.

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