KSI (Knowledge, Strength, and Integrity) built his following by posting commentary while playing the FIFA soccer video game on YouTube. The 30-year-old’s content now is mostly music videos and behind-the-scenes snippets of his boxing exploits. The two men have faced off in the boxing ring, and their distinct personalities play well together in this latest venture with Congo Brands, which also owns hydration and supplement brands 3D Energy Drinks and Alani Nu. “If you go back through the history of audience building,” says Dinin, “the value is in the eyeballs.”

In fact, those eyeballs have done very well for Congo, KSI, and Paul. In June, the brand expanded its European footprint by launching in Denmark, Norway, Germany, and Spain. Of course, there were stunts. At a public appearance in Copenhagen, Paul and KSI asked their audience to throw empty Prime bottles at them while the duo feigned anger. The idea was to make it seem like Paul and KSI’s fans had turned on them. They posted clips of the scene to social media without mentioning that they’d set the whole thing up, making it seem very real. The public (and totally staged) pelting got a ton of attention.

“The media had a field day on this one,” Paul said on a TikTok post he made following the stunt (which was KSI’s idea), noting that the flood of news hits about the fake riot earned Prime tens of millions of free impressions. “It’s a great example of one of my favorite sayings,” Paul said in the post. “‘Perhaps if you don’t get the joke, you are the joke.’” Paul calls this type of thing a “Marketing Masterclass,” posting them on TikTok.

In another video, he explains how Prime managed to capture 100 million views for free by capitalizing on a suggestive meme that pokes fun at a Congo marketing campaign. KSI and Paul had shot a totally benign ad campaign for a new Prime flavor, Strawberry Watermelon. A photo in the campaign, depicting KSI drinking from and Paul holding the new pink bottles, was anonymously doctored into a meme to portray something pretty suggestive; not at all the actual image meant for the campaign. The meme made its way to Twitter, where @tize4PF posted the fake shot and asked, “Who directed the ad campaign for Prime, bro?” The post went viral and built some organic, and completely free, marketing. To date, the doctored post has 37.9 million views, more than 300,000 likes, and more than 14,000 retweets.

Joan Driggs, VP of thought leadership and content at Circana, has been following the connection between consumers and products for the bulk of her career. Her consumer behavior analysis firm ranked Congo Brands’ female-focused Alani Nu as an industry pacesetter in 2022, and her impression of Prime’s rise is similar. What’s interesting, she says, is the comparison of media spending by different brands across the category.

For instance, she says marketing company Kantar reported that Congo’s Alani Nu brand spent $9,000 on traditional media, while its competitor Dr. Pepper Zero spent $23 million. (Alani Nu pulled in $228 million in its first year of business, which is in line with Prime’s $250 million bar.) While Driggs didn’t have data on Prime’s spend (and since Congo never responded to interview requests from WIRED for this story, or to Driggs’ when Circana approached the company about its industry award last year), it does beg the question of how much Prime is actually spending to get such stunning results, when many of the long-established brands in the space have been spending far more for far longer.