Poppi bought its Super Bowl ad slot five days out, and the scramble was the point
Poppi, a challenger beverage brand, secured a Super Bowl ad through the secondary market less than a week before the game. The move was not a lucky accident. It reflects a deliberate philosophy that has shaped every major decision the company has made since launch.
Allison Ellsworth, co-founder and chief brand officer of Poppi, did not plan the company’s Super Bowl debut months in advance through the standard upfront market. “We bought the Super Bowl 5 days before the Super Bowl,” she says. A large company released a slot, the secondary market opened it up, and Poppi moved. For an established advertiser, that timeline would be a crisis. For Poppi, it was entirely consistent with how the brand has always operated.
The through-line in Poppi’s decision-making is a stated preference for brand instinct over data outputs. Ellsworth describes the tension explicitly: when the data told her which flavors to prioritize in the product lineup, she evaluated the recommendation on visual terms instead. The data pointed to certain combinations; she pushed back because those combinations did not look right together on the shelf. Her framing to buyers was direct. Every decision, she has said, came down to two filters: brand first, digital first. The goal was a shelf presence that was vibrant enough to stop a shopper, not a range optimized by sales projections alone.
That same logic shaped the company’s early distribution strategy. Poppi put its entire early operation through Amazon, a platform on which, as Ellsworth acknowledges, beverage brands do not make meaningful money. The board made the call anyway. Amazon was not treated as a revenue channel; it was treated as a marketing channel, a way to build awareness at a moment when the brand needed reach more than it needed margin. The economics were unfavorable and the rationale was deliberate.
We bought the Super Bowl 5 days before the Super Bowl. Allison Ellsworth
What the Super Bowl purchase shares with both of those earlier decisions is a willingness to prioritize signal over efficiency. Buying a slot five days out through the secondary market is not the most cost-controlled way to plan a major brand moment. It is, however, a way to take a slot that a larger, slower-moving competitor released, and to treat that opening as an opportunity rather than a logistical problem. The brand-first reflex that overrode flavor data and accepted thin Amazon margins is the same one that compressed a months-long media buy into a five-day turnaround.
For challenger brands in crowded consumer categories, the Poppi approach surfaces a real tension. Data-driven assortment and distribution planning exist for good reasons: they reduce waste, align supply with demand, and give buyers a common language. But Ellsworth’s account of Poppi’s growth suggests that the brand’s most consequential decisions were made by overriding or reframing those outputs, not by following them. The shelf had to jump. The Amazon losses had to be reclassified as marketing spend. The Super Bowl slot had to be grabbed in five days or not at all. Each of those moves required someone to hold a position the spreadsheet did not recommend.
Whether that posture is repeatable for brands without Poppi’s specific timing and category tailwinds is a harder question than the anecdote alone can answer. What the evidence does show is that the instinct was consistent across product decisions, channel strategy, and media buying, from the earliest days on Amazon through the week before the Super Bowl. That consistency is what separates a philosophy from a lucky break.