Last Updated on July 31, 2026 by Team TBH
On July 1, 2026, DASH Water switched on the largest media campaign in its nine-year history. Running the full month across Sky, ITV1, out-of-home, digital, and — for the first time — commercial radio, the push is built to deliver more than 203 million impacts, reach one in seven UK adults an average of 25 times, and blanket roughly 72% of London adults during the month.
For a soft drinks challenger brand best known for turning misshapen fruit into sparkling water, it’s a genuinely startling scale-up, and it says as much about how a strong ad test score changes a marketing budget as it does about the drink itself.
From SodaStream samples to 40% market share
DASH’s origin story is unusually specific about the problem it set out to solve. Founders Jack Scott and Alex Wright, both from farming backgrounds, left jobs at a large fruit-drinks producer in 2017 having watched roughly a third of farmed produce get discarded for cosmetic reasons — misshapen, undersized, or otherwise “wonky” fruit and vegetables that supermarkets wouldn’t stock. Their pitch was simple: carbonate spring water, infuse it with rescued produce, and skip the added sugar or sweeteners entirely. They tested the idea the unglamorous way, handing out samples from a SodaStream to passersby across London on weekends.
Setting up production turned out to cost roughly £15 million, well beyond two twenty-something founders’ reach, so they leaned on Virgin StartUp backing and angel investors before Beringea, manager of the ProVen VCTs, led an £8.7 million Series A round in 2022 to fund expansion into Europe and Australia. The bet paid off: DASH is now the UK’s leading seltzer by share, at over 40% of the category, sold through more than 11,000 outlets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Starbucks, and British Airways, with production in both the UK and Australia.
The company expected to sell around 50 million cans in 2025 on turnover of roughly £42 million, and it picked up a spot on the FT 1000 Europe 2025 list on the strength of 74.3% compound annual growth between 2020 and 2023. Victoria Beckham is a widely reported fan of the Raspberry flavour; for her Paris Fashion Week show, DASH rebadged cans as “POSH” as a nod to her nickname.
The platform: rejecting compromise
The campaign scaling up this July isn’t new creative territory for DASH — it’s the brand doubling down on a platform it introduced barely a year earlier. “The Drink That Has It All” made its national TV debut on July 1, 2025, created by independent agency The Or and directed by Somesuch’s Freddie Waters. The hero film followed the uncompromising life of a woman at the centre of a seven-person polycule, using the setup as a tongue-in-cheek vehicle for DASH’s actual pitch: with real fruit flavour and no sacrifice on health, you don’t have to choose between what tastes good and what’s good for you.
Jack Scott, DASH’s co-founder and CMO, framed the platform as a direct rejection of how the wellness category usually talks to people: “Compromising is quite simply, boring. People are fed up with being told what they shouldn’t have, so we’re flipping the traditional wellness script and injecting it with flavour and fun.” Paulo Salomao, The Or’s managing partner, described the goal as putting the brand’s personality “front and centre” through an amused, zeitgeisty read on ditching compromise altogether. That 2025 debut was already DASH’s largest-ever media spend at the time, backed by national sampling across London, Bristol, Manchester, and Birmingham — a bar this July’s campaign has now cleared by a wide margin.
Scaling it up: the numbers behind July 2026
What changed between 2025 and 2026 is reach and channel mix, not message. DASH is running refreshed OOH creative that leans harder into its taste credentials, alongside an expanded media plan that, for the first time, includes commercial radio via Capital and Heart. The rest of the plan spans Sky and ITV1 for TV, plus digital and out-of-home — a combination designed to blanket the country during peak summer soft-drink occasions rather than concentrate spend in any single channel.
Scott pointed to hard evidence behind the bigger bet: DASH’s TV advert scored 5.1 stars with market research firm System1 among category buyers aged 20 to 40 in the ABC1 demographic, putting it in the top 6% of all ads System1 has tested and comfortably ahead of the 3.1-star average for soft drinks. “This year, we’re building on that momentum with refreshed out-of-home creative that dials up DASH’s taste credentials, alongside an expanded media plan that introduces new channels and takes the campaign further than ever before,” Scott said, adding that the test score gave the brand “real confidence” heading into its biggest media push to date.
Beyond the airwaves: an on-pack promotion
The media blitz isn’t running alone. DASH paired the campaign with its first-ever national on-pack promotion, giving shoppers who buy from the 500ml Big DASH range a chance to win a MINI. The mechanic is aimed squarely at the summer meal-deal occasion — the moment a shopper decides which drink joins their sandwich and crisps — reinforcing the media campaign’s reach with an in-store incentive to actually pick DASH off the shelf.
Why this matters
DASH’s move is a useful data point in a wider argument playing out across UK grocery marketing this summer: that challenger brands with proven creative are increasingly willing to bet real money on scaling it, rather than treating a strong ad test as a nice-to-have case study. Scott’s own framing draws a clean line from creative performance to media spend — the System1 score didn’t just validate the ad, it justified the budget. For a category where big multinational soft drinks manufacturers have launched competing seltzers chasing DASH’s early lead, buying 203 million impacts and a first-ever radio presence is as much a defensive move as a growth one: making sure that when consumers reach for a sparkling water this summer, DASH is the name they’ve heard the most.
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