Case Study Commerce

How Reading the Cart Helped poppi Grow Sales 91%

Read the cart. Then write the script.

How purchase data turned poppi’s first Big Game spot into a measurable growth moment, and became the blueprint for Adaptive Commerce.

Before It Had a Name

Before we called it Adaptive Commerce, we were doing it with poppi.

In 2022 and 2023, poppi, a prebiotic soda made with apple cider vinegar and prebiotics, was a challenger in a category of giants. It started where its shoppers already were: the digital shelf. Retail media wasn’t about distribution. It was about getting people to try a flavor.

That start gave us something most brands don’t have going into a big creative bet: real purchase signals.

Ambition: Take on Big Soda

poppi’s ambition was never small. It set out to prove that a better-for-you challenger could stand next to—and even surpass—the category’s giants. Retail media was working, and the next move was the boldest yet: The Big Game, aka the most massive stage in advertising. 

The ambition for the spot was never just a big night. It was a big night that had to answer to the cart. A TVC that moved trial and sales at Instacart, Target, Amazon and Walmart, powered by a plan that could prove it.

Action: Read the Cart, Change the Creative, Move Before Kickoff

The obvious way forward was to lead with cola. It’s the flavor everyone already knows, and it’s easy to imagine in a 30-second spot. The purchase data disagreed. Fruit flavors were the front door for new-to-brand shoppers, and Strawberry Lemon was the gateway flavor. This wasn’t an audience-research hunch. It was what people were actually buying.

So we changed course, and changed it early:

• The hero changed. Strawberry Lemon moved to the front of poppi’s video creative, with lifestyle imagery added around it.
• The story changed. Audience research drawn from commerce data shaped who the Big Game ad spoke to, and what it said to them.
• The idea traveled. One creative idea was amplified across every activation in the ecosystem, so brand moments and full-funnel performance worked together for the greater good.
• The shelf followed. Product pages and media creative shifted toward the flavors recruiting new customers, and conversion spiked.

Accountability: Prove It Where Shopper Actually Buys

poppi shoppers don’t live in one retailer. They may sample a single can in one place and buy a larger pack in another. So measurement had to follow the shopper, not the channel.

Here is what that showed:

Media running on one platform was driving sales on another. A channel was creating value far beyond the transaction it got credit for. Judged only by sales inside each retailer, TikTok and Amazon Video would have looked smaller than they were.

With that visibility, poppi and Tinuiti could see what was working, what could work better, and where the next opportunity was, then redistribute investment across the whole ecosystem instead.

Momentum: Every Win Set Up the Next

The Big Game wasn’t the end of the story. It was the start of a method.

Fruit-forward creative is still the center of poppi’s work today. And the learning became a system: what people buy shapes who we reach, what we say, where we invest, and which products we promote. And every result sharpens the next move.

That’s the compounding effect of accountability. poppi is where we first applied it. We call it Adaptive Commerce: we use what people actually buy to make all of marketing smarter, then use the results to improve what happens next.

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