America’s Problem Was the Straw

SodaStream, for anyone who missed 2014, is an Israeli company that makes countertop machines for carbonating tap water. Their environmental pitch against Pepsi and Coke—fewer plastic bottles, make your own—is reasonable enough, and their Super Bowl ad that year featured Scarlett Johansson doing what Scarlett Johansson has been doing to people’s nervous systems since roughly 2003: being present in a room in a way that makes the room irrelevant.

CBS rejected the ad. Officially, the reason was competitive disparagement—the original cut named Pepsi and Coke directly, which you can’t do when those companies are also buying airtime during the same broadcast. SodaStream was delighted to let the "too sexy for American TV" story run instead, because that story was worth more than the slot they’d been rejected from. The beverage industry protects itself; SodaStream turned that protection into a press cycle.

The banned version circulated everywhere immediately, because that’s how this works. The ad got seen by more people for being rejected than it ever would have reached with the airtime. Correctly calibrated cynicism, or dumb luck dressed up as strategy—hard to say, and it doesn’t really matter.

What matters, practically speaking, is that the ad is not actually very provocative. Scarlett Johansson pours sparkling water, drinks through a straw, and does a thing with her eyes that short-circuits the decision-making part of your brain. That’s the whole ad. For anyone whose morning has ever been improved by exactly that kind of image—and I’m not going to pretend I’m not in that demographic—it delivers without needing anything more explicit. America’s problem was apparently the straw.