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The end is near! The end of the year, that is: the sprint toward the holiday season, the holiday season itself. It’s a lot. Joyful as it is, it can all get pretty exhausting.
As the air grows colder and the clocks turn back and the leaves fall to the sidewalk, I couldn’t blame anybody for needing a bit of a pick me up. Something to put a pep in our collective step. So it’s no wonder, then, that the energy drink space is booming.
An industry expert and friend of CreatorIQ recently emailed me inquiring about our metrics on energy drink brands—the usual ‘who’s winning, who’s losing’ question. In putting together a response for him, I was shocked to see just how many energy drink brands are in our database, many of which I’d never even heard of. It seems like these days you can just stick a random all-caps word in front of “energy” and bang, you’ve got a company! That was certainly true for the folks behind BANG Energy, but BURN, GURU, GLYTCH, UPTIME, and HELL all had the same idea.
Powerthirst wasn’t satire, folks. It was a prediction.
In the same way that I’m not a coffee drinker (my smugness over that fact is all the fuel I need), I am also not an energy drink guy. As anyone who knows me can attest, I’m a bursting ball of excitability as is, so I hardly need any additional effervescence. But where there’s BURN and HELL there’s fire, so clearly the industry is doing well. I’ve already discussed Red Bull, but I figured that energy drinks require further investigation.
The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): Celsius
There are many reasons why this investigation should begin with Celsius. First off, it’s one of the biggest (most energetic?) names in the industry. Plus, they’re a longtime CreatorIQ client, and we love to repay that sort of support. Last and not least, one time I saw CreatorIQ CEO Chris Harrington drinking a Celsius, so I know that this support goes all the way to the top.
Frankly, I didn’t even need that subtle hint, because Celsius’ growth speaks for itself:
Celsius EMV: 2018 - 2023
While it was founded in 2004, momentum for Celsius really kicked off in 2020, which feels like a weird year for people to suddenly need a lot more energy. To do what—visit your living room? Then again, from another way of looking, it makes sense that people needed a boost circa 2020. As we’ll examine a little later on, it was also a big year for the sort of media figures that Celsius often works with.
We see a similar, though slightly less pronounced, pattern playing out for both Celsius’ community size…
Celsius Community Size: 2018 - 2023
And content volume…
Celsius Content Volume: 2018 - 2023
Technically, that’s not the same graph three times. But it sort of is.
What kickstarted Celsius’ growth? And what has the brand done to sustain and build upon that momentum? In looking at the content, several points stand out:
Cross-Market, Cross-Platform Partnerships
One big appeal about food and beverage as a vertical, and energy drinks in particular, is that they’re for everybody. While certain industries are a bit more pigeonholed, everyone eats, and everyone needs energy. That’s why some of Celsius’ most impactful partners over the years of its growth have included:
- A NASCAR driver (Toni Breidinger)
- A bodybuilder (Alex Eubank)
- Another bodybuilder (Nick Walker)
- A boxer (Jake Paul)
- A comedian/podcaster (Theo Von)
- Another podcaster (George Jenko)
- A mixed martial artist (Dustin Poirier)
- A model (Toni Breidinger again)
Granted, these are mostly physical activities (podcasting can be quite a workout), but the point stands: Celsius has thrived at the intersection of sports and new media—a lucrative nexus for many such brands.
Some of these partnerships are more timebound than others: after Alex Eubank ranked as Celsius’ top earner in 2023, he didn’t post about the brand in 2024. Similarly, Toni Breidinger (who you might remember as one of Raising Cane’s top partners) didn’t mention Celsius in 2023, but has been all about the brand in 2024, ranking as its top EMV-driver (get it? Like NASCAR?) from January to September. With Eubank’s fellow bodybuilder Nick Walker also posting less frequently in 2024 than 2023, Celsius appears to be moving away from the Mr. Olympia circle, and favoring a wider crew of marginally less muscular (but still extremely active) brand partners.
In many ways, this is the blueprint for success for both F&B and other brands in 2024 and beyond: establishing a community of extremely viral individuals with a presence on multiple platforms, then turning them loose to promote the brand as they see fit. Bonus points if these individuals boast a background in the increasingly fertile, Gen Z-beloved territories of sports, media, and comedy.
Uniting Creators Around Brand Moments
Alright, so you’ve got all these big names on your roster. How do you galvanize them to become fully invested brand partners?
Well, a pretty good start would be throwing the most talked-about party at Coachella, which is itself more or less the world’s most talked-about party. That’s exactly what Celsius did this past April, when the brand launched its new Space Vibe Trilogy of flavors with a celeb-studded event at the music festival. Featuring T-Pain, hydration, and plenty of good vibes, the Cosmic Desert party went on to become a signature moment in the online discourse around this year’s Coachella.
Guests who posted about their time in the Cosmic Desert included actress Emma Roberts, social media royalty Charli D’Amelio, actual mermaid Halle Bailey, and many more. But beyond the impact from direct mentions of the party, Celsius also successfully signaled something to creators and social media users alike: in an era of creator marketing that often favors limited, smaller scale activations, Celsius isn’t afraid to go big.
It’s Not a Drink, It’s a Lifestyle
But Celsius isn’t just about the big moments. Like other savvy brands, it balances out splashy event-based creator marketing initiatives with plenty of everyday content, emphasizing its product’s consistent role in creators’ lives. By showing how a wide range of creators all return time and again to the same energy beverage of choice, content about Celsius emphasizes the product’s ubiquity and versatility.
The other thing that Celsius fans appreciate? A sense of humor. Whether it’s a relationship skit from TikToker Sebastien Andrade (@ayesebastien), a gaming skit from The Pointer Brothers, or a shoutout from comedy podcaster (and Celsius sponsoree) Theo Von, the brand was all about making consumers laugh. After all, laughter is its own form of dopamine rush.
Thanks to these all-inclusive strategies, Celsius enjoyed one of the hallmarks of healthy brands, at least as I see it: community-based hashtags at the very tippity top of its top hashtags list, rather than anything generic or advertorial:
Top Hashtags for Jan - Sept 2024
It’s astounding just how drastically #CelsiusLiveFit and #CelsiusBrandPartner, both of which are used by Celsius ambassadors in a range of contexts, outpace all other hashtags. It’s also fairly telling that #159359 and #JakePaul—associated with Theo Von and (spoiler alert) Jake Paul, respectively—outpaced #Celsius itself. That’s a clear sign of a thriving creator community. You know, in case the rest of this blog post wasn’t enough.
Boy, I sure am tired after all that writing. Also, I’m craving some kind of fruit flavor. If only there were a brand that could help me out with that…
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