TThere is no doubt that everyone loves the mobile game Angry Birds.  While it is not the dominant force that it once was, it is still a cultural phenomenon. Various iterations of the franchise have been downloaded over 1 billion times!  If one walks up to a random person on the street and asks them if they have heard of Angry Birds, it is more likely than not that the answer will be yes.  So clearly the natural next move is to create an Angry Birds soda, right?

The maker of Angry Birds, Rovio Entertainment, is doing everything it can to leverage the popularity of the brand. There are movies in the works, theme parks, apparel and now….Angry Birds soda?!? Taking a popular brand and using it to make money elsewhere is business 101 but the soda thing seems a little out there. Using a digital brand and activating it across a series of multimedia ventures is good business. If they have a good script and popular voices, an Angry Birds movie could work.  In addition, there are several examples of media brands being used for theme parks with lots of success – Harry Potter being the most obvious one.  In fact, there is a place in this world for a Grand Theft Auto theme park but don’t want to digress (think fake carjackings, organized police chases and staged melees).  And last, apparel is an obvious and expected way to make money off of a brand – they make t-shirts with everything so why not Angry Birds?

So that brings the discussion to soda. There is Angry Birds soda in Finland, Russia, New Zealand, Australia and Spain. Evidently the soda has done quite well in Finland but Finland is weird so that doesn’t count (if you need proof look at this or this).  There are no reports on how the soda has performed in the other countries but it is hard to imagine that people are consistently picking it over Coke, Pepsi or Mountain Dew.  Maybe if Mountain Dew wanted to do some sort of special limited edition Angry Birds can it would make some sense but Angry Birds soda?  Seems a bit out there.

One has to guess that Rovio is trying to avoid the plight of Zynga (at its peak 9 months ago Zynga was worth $10 billion but it has now fallen to around $2 billion).  Zynga has found it tough to churn out versions of its ‘Ville franchise that people care about.  At some point, one can only build so many farms and cities.  The stock market has noticed and Zynga is now scrambling to figure out how to stabilize itself.  Zynga is spending a lot of time thinking about getting into online poker for real cash.  While they may or may not have success there, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than a Mafia Wars soda.

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