Messi and Alex Cooper Just Proved an Audience Isn't a Moat. I Went and Graded My Own.

Messi sits on around 516 million Instagram followers. He couldn't sell the second bottle.

Mark Anthony Group phased out Mas+ By Messi in January, under two years after the brand's June 2024 debut, saying it "did not achieve all of our objectives."

Bloomberg reported August 13 that Alex Cooper's Unwell line shuts down this fall, right after the Halloween flavors ship. Nestle joint venture from 2025. Target still has stock and they're selling it through.

Both brands checked every box an independent founder is told to chase.

National distribution on day one. A corporate partner with a real supply chain behind it. An audience already assembled and already paying attention.

They failed anyway.

If you sell food or beverage and somebody talked you into thinking follower count sits between you and scale, the last three weeks were a gift.

The line that belongs taped to your monitor

Modern Retail ran the pattern piece on August 25. They pulled two quotes that do more work than most strategy decks.

Mark Gallo called it straight. A famous person's following is an awareness asset. Retail is a velocity business. Those aren't the same currency. He's done beverage sales and distribution for Anheuser-Busch and Heineken, so he's watched the gap up close.

Sunny Bonnell runs the branding shop Motto. She put it from the other side. There's a big difference between having attention and having permission to enter a category.

That is the whole autopsy. The name gets somebody to pick the can up once. Taste, price and whether it did what it said decide whether they pick it up again. Gallo's read is that most celebrity brands are a me-too formulation at a premium price, so there is no second purchase waiting at the end of the first one.

Kim Kardashian wound down Skkn in 2025 and folded the products into Skims. Gwen Stefani's Gxve Beauty closed earlier this year. Drew Barrymore's Flower Beauty got discontinued the year before. Modern Retail ran the list.

Those three pull more attention than any brand you or I will ever work on. Nobody's big enough to skip that math.

The category keeps filling up.

Tastewise has functional beverages growing more than 29 percent year over year in 2026. The New Consumer counted dozens of new beverage companies and products launched in the US by May.

Everybody shows up at a premium price. Almost nobody shows up with permission.

So I ran the same test on myself

I read all of it Monday night. Tuesday morning I did something I didn't enjoy.

I pulled my own sitemap. gallucci.net carries 962 blog URLs.

Domain's been registered since October 1998. Long enough that I've published the same advice under four different platform regimes and watched three of them quit existing.

I sorted the titles into two piles. Pile one is posts where I'm reporting something I actually did, shot, tested, broke, or paid for. Pile two is posts that explain a thing any competent person with a search bar could explain to you for free.

Pile two is bigger.

Pile two is my Mas+. It buys the click the way Messi's face bought the first can. It doesn't buy the second visit. A post explaining query fan-out to an outdoor brand is a me-too formulation at a premium price, and the free version sits three results down.

That's an awkward thing to put up on the same site those posts already live on. It's also the only honest way to make the argument. I'd rather grade my own archive than yours.

What earns the second purchase

Gallo said one more thing in that piece most readers will skim right past. He said the absence of a celebrity can be an asset, and that the founders doing the operator work, the distributor meetings, the retailer meetings, the content for the brand, are the ones at an advantage.

If you run a small brand, read that twice.

Skipping the spokesman isn't a consolation prize. It's the strategy.

What that changes about social media marketing for food brands is less comfortable than it sounds.

Stop making content whose only job is to get found. Every explainer you publish competes against an infinite supply of explainers, most of them free and a growing share of them machine-written. Awareness content is the beverage aisle in 2026. Crowded, expensive, and nobody in it has permission.

Start making content only your operation could have made. The wash line. The lot codes. The co-packer who went quiet on you in March. The pallet that came back. The reason you switched suppliers and what the switch cost you. None of that can be copied, because nobody else was standing there when it happened.

Publish the record instead of the argument. I have written a dozen versions of the case that credibility beats follower counts, including one with that idea in the title, and another arguing the same thing from the natural and organic side. The version that would actually move a buyer is a photograph of the field with a date on it.

I also wrote, not long ago, that the middle layer is disappearing and your audience is the only thing that survives it. I still think that is mostly right, and this month complicates it in a way I did not see coming. An audience survives when you built it around the thing you make. It evaporates when you rented it from somebody famous.

The shelf space comes back

One practical note nobody seems to be saying out loud.

Unwell's set at Target has to go to somebody this fall. Mas+ already vacated. That shelf space is back in play the second a celebrity brand folds.

If you've spent two years listening to somebody call your slower, product-first build the weaker play, that argument just got a lot harder to make. There's an opening on the other side of it.

Which means the useful question this month is not how many people follow you. It is whether you can show a buyer eighteen months of proof that you actually make the thing.

Most brands can. They've got it sitting on a phone in a truck somewhere, unsorted and unpublished.

The work I do as a food and beverage marketing agency is mostly that. I go through what a brand already has and pull the handful of images and receipts that prove the story it's been trying to tell with adjectives.

If that's you, write me at giovanni@gallucci.net and tell me what's on the camera roll.