Five energy brands are in tens of thousands of stores. Two of them run no ads at all.

What we did, so you can repeat it or disprove it.

On 5 September 2026 we opened Meta’s public Ad Library in a rendered browser, set the country to the United States, filtered to active advertisements, and searched each brand name as an exact phrase. We counted what came back. We then matched each brand against publicly reported retail door counts and funding from named publications, and looked at what each brand says publicly about its creator programme.

What would make these counts wrong. Exact-phrase search undercounts a brand whose advertisements do not contain the exact phrase we searched. A brand running ads that say only part of its name will look quieter than it is. The method can also overcount if an unrelated advertiser happens to use the same phrase. And it is one day. Any brand here can launch a campaign tomorrow morning and make this page out of date. We are publishing the method rather than only the numbers so that anyone can check it, including the brands themselves.

We are not naming any brand that is a PELORA client or prospect, and every figure below comes from a public source we have linked.

Five brands, and what each one is actually running.

Sources, per claim. Lucky Energy, over 15,000 stores: Yahoo Finance, 14 April 2026; the $25 million Series B: PR Newswire, 12 November 2025. Gorgie, 1,900 Target stores and $37 million raised: PR Newswire, 29 April 2025. Bloom Sparkling Energy, store range: Beverage Industry, 24 April 2025; first-year volume: Retail Boss, 6 July 2025. ZOA Energy, majority ownership: Food Dive, 7 November 2024; creator programme and sampling: Molson Coors, 15 October 2025. Juvee, store growth including 1,100 Target locations: BevNET, 1 May 2024. The advertisement counts are our own observation, not a published figure, read in a rendered browser in Meta’s public Ad Library on 5 September 2026, United States, active advertisements, exact-phrase search on each brand name. They are reproducible only by repeating that search, and the number will have moved.

Getting into the store and advertising that you are in the store are two different projects.

The pattern that survives every caveat in our method is this one. Two of the five brands are in national retail and running nothing at all under their own name. A third is in thousands of doors while most of the advertising that mentions it is paid for by the retailers rather than by the brand.

That is a strange way to spend money when you look at it plainly. A brand fights for a shelf, pays for the placement, ships the product, and then leaves it to a shopper to discover the can by walking past it. Meanwhile the same brand has an audience on social media that has no idea which shop near them now stocks it.

The two brands that do connect them are the two best funded in the read, and they do the same specific thing: within days of a launch, an advertisement names the chain, carries an offer, and is shown to people who live near those doors. It is the least glamorous advertising in the category and it is the only kind that turns a distribution win into a sale.

Silence on paid is not the same as doing nothing.

Neither of the two brands running no advertisements is inactive. One publicly describes a creator roster in the hundreds and a sampling programme measured in hundreds of thousands of cans. The other has a community that predates the drink.

Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions.

The encouraging one. A large creator programme does not require a large advertising budget. If a brand can put content in front of people through creators, it can be present in a category without being the biggest spender in it. The bar for being the loudest paid voice in this category is low, because so few are shouting.

The cautionary one. Not advertising is only a strategy if the alternative is actually running. A brand with no advertising and no creator programme and no owned audience is not being disciplined. It is being invisible, and the difference is easy to miss from inside the company.

Almost nobody runs an ad from a creator’s own account.

The category is described, constantly, as creator-led. What we could observe does not match the description. Across five brands, advertising delivered from a creator’s own handle, the format Meta calls a partnership ad and TikTok calls a Spark Ad, appeared once.

Celebrity and creator content was everywhere. It was almost always running from the brand’s own page, which is a different thing to a viewer. An advertisement from a brand reads as a brand talking. The same footage delivered from the creator’s handle, with the paid partnership label attached, reads as a person recommending something, because it is.

We cannot tell you what that difference is worth in this category, because nobody has published a controlled comparison and we are not going to invent one. What we can say is that the format is barely being used by the five brands most likely to use it.

What to do first if you just got into stores.

In order, and the first one costs almost nothing.

1. Announce the doors you already have. One campaign per retailer, shown only to people who live near those shops, carrying whatever offer the retailer will agree to. You have already paid for the distribution. This is the cheapest sale in the business and it is the one most often skipped.

2. Make sure a sale can be measured before you buy attention. If the tracking that tells an advertising platform who bought is not installed and working, every pound after this point is spent blind and the platform cannot learn. Check it before the campaign, not after.

3. Connect the audience you already have to the shelf. A large following on one platform and a shop three miles away are useless to each other unless something links them. A store locator, a post naming the chain, an email to the list.

4. Then, and only then, buy new attention. New awareness is the most expensive thing on this list and the last thing that should be bought, because everything above it converts people who already know you.

What we did not measure, and would not.

We did not measure spend. Meta’s public library shows spend ranges only for political and social-issue advertising, so any dollar figure for these brands would be a guess dressed as a finding.

We did not measure performance. We cannot see anyone’s return on advertising spend, and no page claiming to has seen it either.

We did not count advertising on platforms without a public library, which means this is a read of one channel rather than a picture of a brand’s whole programme. A brand quiet here may be loud elsewhere.

We did not include any brand that is a PELORA client or prospect, and we did not use anything told to us privately.

If you run one of these brands and our count is wrong, we would like to know and we will correct it on this page with the date of the correction.

What this costs, from the filings.

The counting on this page says what these brands advertise. A companion study reads three public companies’ annual reports to say what advertising in this category actually costs them, and finds one beverage brand whose shelf fees came to about half its entire marketing line while never appearing in the marketing budget. Read what supplement and beverage brands actually spend.

If the question is what you may say rather than what it costs, the sourced reference on what a supplement or functional beverage brand is not allowed to say quotes every FTC, FDA and platform rule from the publisher’s own page.