Numbers don’t lie. This one ended an argument in six weeks.

Every brand claims it stands for something. Almost none of them are willing to spend real media money finding out if anyone actually believes them. I put that to the test with SodaStream, and the result wasn’t a nice-to-have insight buried in a slide. It was a number that shut the debate down entirely.

Here’s the bet most marketers won’t make: put your purpose message and your product message in front of the exact same people, in the exact same auction, and let the click decide which one wins. No focus group. No hiding behind “brand sentiment.” Just data, live, with money on the table.

I led that bet for SodaStream’s “Drink Better” campaign, a piece of work that later ran as its own feature on Bizcommunity. On paper, it’s a line about fizzy water. Underneath, it’s a line about plastic, and South Africa’s plastic problem is not an abstraction. The country throws away 2.4 million tonnes of the stuff every year, 41kg per person, above the global average, and only 14% of it ever gets recycled, according to IUCN’s regional hotspotting report. People walk past that problem every day. So I stopped asking whether they wanted sparkling water, and started testing whether they wanted in on the fix. It’s the same instinct behind my piece on the fragmented agency model: stop guessing what the market wants. Build the test that tells you, then believe what it says.

The short version: R37,692 spent on Meta, 866,737 people reached, and a purpose-led creative that beat every product-led alternative by taking 87% of all landing-page views. It also drove 1,213 new first-party email sign-ups at roughly R31 each, with zero unsubscribes.

The number that won

87%.

That’s the share of all landing-page views claimed by a single creative I ran: “Replace Plastic Bottles,” the purpose-led execution, going head to head against every product-led alternative in the campaign. Not a slight edge. A landslide. South Africans did not click because it was fizzy. They clicked because they wanted to be part of the fix. If you’ve ever sat in a boardroom arguing whether purpose “actually moves the needle,” this is what the answer looks like when you stop debating it and go and measure it.

Small budget, no excuses

R37,692. That’s the entire media spend I worked with, running across Facebook and Instagram from 1 May to 30 June 2026. It reached 866,737 people. I ran two audiences in parallel under continuous testing, one built to be efficient, one built to scale, both optimised against the harder metric: landing-page views, not the vanity comfort of impressions. The efficiency audience delivered views at R4.57 each. The scale audience reached over 600,000 people on its own. Blended across the whole flight: R4.91 per view, 7,680 qualified landing-page views, 16,648 link clicks, and a result that beat benchmark without breaking a sweat. That kind of discipline matters more every quarter Meta spends pulling ahead of Google in ad revenue: the platform’s reach is only worth what your targeting logic can do with it.

The click was never the finish line

Here’s what a lot of campaigns miss. The click is not the win. What happens after it is. This campaign lifted new users on the SodaStream site by 184%, to 18,000. Page views jumped 63%, to 44,000. And buried inside all of that traffic: 1,213 new first-party email sign-ups, at roughly R31 each, with zero unsubscribes.

Zero. Not one person who signed up regretted it enough to leave.

That’s the number that actually outlives the flight. Media spend stops the day the budget runs out. A first-party list, built while privacy rules tighten and every other acquisition channel gets more expensive, keeps working long after. R37,692 didn’t just buy traffic. It bought a permanent asset and settled an argument the industry has been having for years.

Numbers don’t lie. This time, they didn’t even leave room for debate.

Questions people ask about this campaign

What was the budget? R37,692, the entire media spend, running across Facebook and Instagram from 1 May to 30 June 2026.

Did purpose or product win? Purpose. The “Replace Plastic Bottles” creative took 87% of all landing-page views against every product-led alternative, in the same auction, to the same audience.

What did it deliver beyond the click? A 184% lift in new site users (to 18,000), a 63% lift in page views (to 44,000), and 1,213 new first-party email sign-ups at roughly R31 each, with zero unsubscribes.

Who ran it? I did. Purpose-led creative against product-led creative, same auction, same audience, so the click alone decided the answer.