A few weeks ago, in Christchurch, New Zealand, George Woodgate got a parcel from the other side of the world. Specifically from his Auntie Lisa, in north Devon. First out of the package was a Manchester United shirt. That was pretty cool – George is mad about football. But it was nothing compared with what came out next: a bottle of Prime Hydration, blue raspberry flavour.
“I was excited,” says George, not sounding that excited, but then George is a shy 11-year-old boy and this is his first international media interview. We’re talking on a video call, morning to evening, summer to winter.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him that excited,” his mum, Meredith, chips in. “His eyes nearly popped out of his head. He spent the next 20 minutes video calling his friends, showing them the drink.”
“We all wanted it,” George says. “Everyone said it tasted good and YouTubers made it.” It did taste good he says. He drank it over a week and gave his friends little sips. He still has the empty bottle on his windowsill to prove it wasn’t a dream.
New Zealand is a couple of months behind the UK in the Prime saga. George was the first person in his school, maybe even the first in Christchurch, to try Prime. Even now you can’t get it readily; it costs more than NZ$20 (£10) online. It is easier – sometimes – in the UK: George’s Auntie Lisa paid £2 at Asda in Barnstaple. Postage was the big expense.
You will be familiar with Prime if you have school-age children, especially if they are boys. The sports drink was launched last year by YouTubers KSI and Logan Paul, who have tens of millions of subscribers and followers between them, and the hype snowballed in a way traditional marketers can only dream of. Or pay millions for.
Limited supplies saw Prime-thirsty punters queueing, and scrapping, to get their hands on a bottle. The hidden market boomed. One shop in Wakefield, Wakey Wines, which became infamous for charging eye-watering prices, went viral on TikTok. “Abdul come closer, Abdul go back, bingo bingo, Gala bingo” (You’ll know if you know).
It became the talk of the playground. At my boys’ primary school, even a used Prime bottle filled with water garnered kudos; the real thing was being dealt by entrepreneurial year 6s, sometimes by the capful (50p or £1 for rare flavours). Unsurprisingly, schools were not so keen. A report by CBBC Newsround last month found several banning it, because of the distraction it caused. When a second version, Prime Energy, was launched earlier this year, there were concerns about its high caffeine content. We’ll get to that.
Meanwhile, KSI (real name JJ Olatunji) and Logan Paul – once opponents in the boxing ring, now business partners – rubbed their hands together (or whatever it is YouTubers do when things are going well). Prime generated US$250m (about £195m) in retail sales in its first year.
Marketing expert Eddie Hammerman, managing director of The 10 Group, which works with Red Bull, says this is a very modern marketing story but it is by no means the first time social media influencers have sold a product. What usually happens is brands go to them and pay them to post about it. “What was smart with KSI and Logan Paul, two of the most successful influencers on YouTube and across social media, is they realised they’ve got a massively engaged audience,” says Hammerman. “They said: why don’t we create our own product, speak directly to our audience and make our own money rather than selling someone else’s products? The more authentic, the better able you are to engage with the audience. It doesn’t look as if they are just flogging products – they really care. That brand connection is really important.”
It might have looked like an overnight success, “but they created a product, they created the branding, they talked with their audience about it before they launched it, they talked about it when they launched it, before it dropped in shops, building up this interest.”
Next up: scarcity marketing – restricting supply to create demand. “Whether they meant to at the beginning – and KSI denies it – they have definitely carried on with that strategy,” says Hammerman. “You create the buzz, you get traditional media reporting on it and you get this cycle of social media and media.” He compares it to what used to happen at Christmas, with parents queueing around the block to get their hands on a particular toy that was – or was seen to be – in short supply.
Far from harming the brand, the controversies – the sky-high resale prices, the fights, school disapproval and bans – will have boosted it. “All of that helps, then kids want it even more,” says Hammerman. “It’s a bit subversive, a bit under the radar, aiming to be exclusive to that audience. A lot of people don’t understand – that’s what they want. They want the younger generation to go: this is our thing, we identify with this product. Customers need to be able to connect in more of an emotional way rather than just a transactional one. There are loads of drinks; we choose what to buy based on what we feel rather than what it tastes like.”
Seriously? It doesn’t matter how it tastes? “Not really. It matters that people want it, and think they want it, or think they need it. That’s the genius in creating the buzz.” He refers me to the Pepsi challenge adverts, which showed more people preferred Pepsi to Coke, but they still drank more Coke.
I’m hardly the target audience, but I’ve tried a couple of flavours of Prime Hydration – ice pop and lemon lime – and can confirm they are horrible: sweet, artificial, they taste more like something you would find in a bathroom, or use to clean with, than something you would willingly consume. My children and their friends, however, insist they are delicious. And at least it hydrates them, I guess.
“They can get hydrated by many different things that are much better for them,” says Judy More, a registered dietitian who specialises in children’s nutrition. “All drinks hydrate children, and so do foods such as soup and yoghurt.”
I read the ingredients of Prime to her over the phone. Coconut water from concentrate? No issue with that, “though it’s not going to benefit them in any way”. Dipotassium phosphate, trimagnesium citrate, natural flavour, sucralose … She stops me there, at the artificial sweetener. “They’re not great for children. There is evidence that we should move away from ultra-processed foods. Those sort of ingredients make it an ultra-processed drink, which is not ideal. Having ultra-processed food and drink puts an awful lot more chemicals into your body, which stresses your immune system because it has to deal with those foreign chemicals.”
It does read more like chemistry than healthy home economics: L-isoleucine, L-leucine, L-valine … these are branched-chain amino acids, important proteins, “but you get them in milk and a glass of milk would be nutritionally better,” says More.
Likewise vitamin A: a bottle of Prime has 900 micrograms of vitamin A, which is above a child’s daily requirement. “It would be all right for a rapidly growing 16-year-old, but that’s too much for a preteen,” says More. “If a child was having that day after day, that’s too much. Vitamin A is fat-soluble, so you don’t excrete the excess – it builds up in your body.”
In short, More says Prime contains lots of things that kids don’t need, and should get from the rest of their diet. “It’s an artificial drink, and there are plenty of natural drinks they can have, such as water and milk.”
More recognises the pressures parents come under. “If families can’t afford to buy their kids the latest trainers or football club strip, they tend to give them pleasure in more economical ways, such as buying them a drink that gives them some pride among their peer group.”
Up to this point we have been talking about Prime Hydration, which contains no caffeine. Earlier this year, however, KSI and Logan Paul launched Prime Energy, which does – 140mg in a 330ml can (200mg in the US). A 250ml can of Red Bull, by comparison, has 80mg. There is a warning on the can that Prime Energy is not suitable for children, but it is essentially up to the retailer whether to sell to them as there is currently no law against it.
In the US on Sunday, Senator Chuck Schumer called on the Food and Drug Administration to investigate Prime Energy’s caffeine levels, describing the drink as “a serious health concern for the kids it so feverishly targets”. His letter to the FDA claimed that many parents thought they were buying juice, only to end up with a “cauldron of caffeine”.
In May, a primary school in Newport, Wales, issued a warning that a pupil had suffered “a cardiac episode” after drinking a Prime Energy drink. A text message sent to parents and seen by WalesOnline read: “The child had to have their stomach pumped and although better now the parent wanted us to share this as a reminder of the potential harmful effects.”
“Caffeine is a drug – young children shouldn’t be having it,” says More. “Some will be more susceptible to it than others. It increases the heart rate – for a child, that’s not a good thing.”
Stoked PR, which represents Prime, says it is “important to note Prime Hydration and Prime Energy are very separate offerings and should not be confused”. I think they can easily be confused – by George’s mum, for example. “I hadn’t done any research into the drink and had no idea of the caffeine levels in it,” she says. “We don’t allow George to drink energy drinks, so it would have been a no even if it was on the shelves.”
It’s fine: George’s bottle of Prime Hydration contained zero caffeine, and as long as she warns Auntie Lisa not to send any, his mum doesn’t need to worry – Prime Energy has been banned in New Zealand.
Hammerman says KSI and Logan Paul’s move into energy drinks is a sign of ambition and empire-building. “The hard bit for them is to keep the buzz going, because once it goes, you can limit the supply but if there isn’t the demand it doesn’t matter.”
How do you keep the buzz going? One way is to aim up in age, at the parents who “know all about it, they’ll have been asked to queue outside Aldi for it”, says Hammerman. “If you can hook a young audience, you can hook an older audience in, too – you can’t go the other way.” He points to the recent collaboration between Adidas and Snapchat, where this has happened. Also TikTok, which started out being for the really young and is now used by people in their 30s and 40s. Witness (again) Wakey Wines.
Now Prime has moved beyond social media to more traditional marketing. There is a partnership with Arsenal (KSI is a supporter), which will tap into the Premier League and a massive global audience. In the US, they have partnerships with the Los Angeles Dodgers and UFC. “I think they have realised that if they want a long-term marketing strategy around a brand, they still need to lean on some of the more traditional approaches,” says Hammerman.
So, is Prime a flash in the panoply of drinkable fads that come and go, like SunnyD (remember that?), or is it here to stay, to compete with the legacy brands such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi? Hammerman thinks it could go the distance, “if they get it right. Equally, if they make mistakes, it could be gone in two years.”
There are already signs that the buzz isn’t as loud as it was. Hammerman’s kids were demanding it a few weeks ago. “I asked them today if they were interested, and they were like: ‘It’s gone – that was so last month.’”
Similar story with mine. “Nah, it’s over,” says one of them. Purely anecdotal, of course: a tiny sample of one generation in one city. It’s not over everywhere, and I’ve got a parcel to post, to Christchurch, New Zealand. Ice pop flavour, that was the deal.
