Real American Beer takes its community programme live on Fox Business

Real American Beer has taken its community programme live on Club, and announced it on national television. Stuart Varney opened the segment by calling it “a first-of-its-kind advertising program where people can earn rewards for helping the company grow its brand”, then put the obvious question to Colby Covington, the UFC fighter and Real American Beer partner sitting across from him.

“Can I get paid to drink your beer?”

“Yep, that’s exactly right.”

How the programme actually works

The mechanic Covington described on air is deliberately low friction. You sign up, you pick a mission, and in his words you are “done in under a minute”. The missions themselves range from the everyday to the genuinely fun: turning up at a Real American Freestyle wrestling event, or as he put it, “just going into your local town and advertising for us”.

The rewards are not only cash. Covington listed “cash, prizes, merchandise, and opportunities to get VIP backstage passes” to Real American Freestyle events. For a brand built around a community that already turns up to things, paying people in access is at least as powerful as paying them in money.

He was also clear that the door is open to more or less anyone, including people who do not drink. “A lot of Americans like to drink beer,” he said, “and we also have the non-alcoholic beer, the Zero, if you don’t want to drink beer and just be sociable with your friends. And you get paid.”

“We don’t have a big parent company behind us”

Varney asked whether the brand does any ordinary advertising. The answer was no, and the reasoning behind it is the most interesting thing in the whole segment.

All the money that we’re not spending on ad revenue is the money we’re going to give back to RAB Nation, and all the people that are going to help us push the beer.Colby Covington, Real American Beer, on Fox Business

That is the entire strategy in one sentence. There is no media budget being trimmed at the edges and no test-and-learn pilot running alongside a paid programme. The advertising money is the community money. “We don’t have a big parent company behind us, these billion dollar companies,” Covington added. “We’re just American owned, made in America.”

It is working at a pace that made Varney sit up. The brand started two years ago. Covington said it has now “sold over 10 million cans in two years” and is “doubling our sales in our key markets” every month, having reached more than thirty states, according to the figure Fox put on screen during the interview.

The biggest advertisers on earth are moving the same way

It would be easy to file a challenger brand skipping ads under novelty, except that the largest advertisers in the world are walking in the same direction with far more money. Unilever’s chief executive Fernando Fernandez committed to putting half the company’s media budget into social, up from thirty per cent, and to working with twenty times more influencers, reaching close to 300,000 creators. We covered what that means for everyone else here. L’Oréal has made a comparable multibillion bet.

The telling number is not the size of those budgets but where they came from. Average influencer marketing budgets grew by 171 per cent year over year, and close to two thirds of that increase was taken directly out of traditional paid and digital advertising. This is not new money being found. It is money being moved.

Brands need to stop throwing money at Mark Zuckerberg

Every pound in a paid social budget is rent. You pay a platform to introduce you to people, many of whom already buy from you, and the introduction lasts exactly as long as the payment does. A community works the other way around: the ambassador you recruit stays recruited, the content they make keeps working, and the relationship sits with the brand rather than on someone else’s balance sheet.

We have made that argument at length in Stop Renting Your Audience, so we will not repeat it here. What is worth noticing is that Real American Beer did not need convincing. They are building this way from launch, with no legacy ad budget to defend and no internal argument to win about whether the community deserves a line item. Most brands only reach for community after a decade of rising acquisition costs has forced their hand. This one started there.

The programme is live

Real American Beer’s community programme is open on Club now. Every dollar that would have gone to a media buy goes to the people drinking the beer instead, and the brand keeps the network it builds rather than renting it back every quarter.

Brands including Samsung, Celsius, Daniel Wellington and Fabletics use Club to build and run ambassador communities at scale.