Messi has 516 million followers and White Claw's distributor. The drink lasted under two years.

Lionel Messi's hydration brand Mas+ shut down this summer, less than two years after it launched. He has 516 million Instagram followers. The functional beverage category it was selling into grew more than 29% year over year in 2026.

The market was not the problem. Neither was awareness.

The easy reading here is that followers do not sell products, and the easy reading is incomplete. Mas+ did not launch out of a bedroom. It launched in partnership with the Mark Anthony Group, the parent company of White Claw, a deal that helped it build deep, strong distribution in its first year. So Messi brought an audience of 516 million, and his partner brought what Digiday calls deep, strong distribution in year one. Reach and coverage, the two line items a go to market team spends almost everything on, were both maxed out. The brand still died inside a category that was growing.

Say that out loud the way an outsider would. Half a billion followers, plus the people who put White Claw in the cooler, and the problem the two of them could not solve was the second can.

The second purchase is a different transaction

Mark Gallo, a beverage sales and distribution manager who previously worked at Anheuser-Busch and Heineken, gave Digiday the mechanic. "Retail is a velocity business," he said. "Those are not the same currency." A celebrity name, in his account, helps convert the first purchase and drive trials, while "the product's taste, effectiveness and price point drive the second purchase." His verdict on the category is blunter: "Most celebrity brands are a 'me too' formulation at usually a premium price, so there is no second purchase."

Sunny Bonnell, founder and CEO of the branding agency Motto, put the same idea in brand terms. "There is a big difference between having attention and having permission to enter a category," she told Digiday. It takes more than a famous name and a face, she said, to convince someone to buy the product.

Attention and permission. One is granted instantly and at enormous scale. The other is granted once, slowly, by a person who tried the thing and came back.

Mas+ is not an isolated case. Alex Cooper's Unwell is winding down this fall after failing to hold interest past the launch buzz. Kim Kardashian folded SKKN into Skims last year. Gwen Stefani's Gxve Beauty closed this year, and Drew Barrymore's Flower Beauty went in 2025. Five audiences that any CMO would trade a quarterly budget for, and five businesses that could not convert them.

B2B is running the same experiment with worse odds

Every founder brand program in B2B is this bet at a smaller scale. Build the chief executive's feed, post the contrarian take, watch the follower count climb, and the pipeline is supposed to follow. It is advice no founder can get away from right now, and Messi just ran it with an audience no B2B founder will ever approach, with a beverage giant handling the shelf, and it did not clear.

That should settle an argument rather than start one. The follower is the trial. It sits at the top of the funnel and it is cheap now, which is the whole point: when everyone can generate reach, reach stops being scarce. We made this argument when LinkedIn shipped a button for reporting AI slop, and the beverage aisle has now tested it with real money.

The brand manager is measuring the wrong half

Ask a brand lead what they report on and you will hear profile views, link clicks per campaign, and cost per impression against other channels. All of those measure the trial. None of them measure the second purchase.

Meanwhile the same brand lead will tell you, usually with some feeling, that employees introduce the company however they like, and that there is no visibility at all into what a rep actually hands over in a room. That is not a reporting gap. That is the second purchase happening entirely off the books. The impression does not deliver the brand. The person who shows up does, and the company has instrumented the first and left the second to chance.

Gallo made one more observation that translates directly. Founders "doing actual operator work", he said, are the ones at an advantage. In B2B that work starts after the post: the dinner, the booth conversation, the follow up that references what was actually said.

Reach is the cheapest line item you own

Awareness is now the cheapest input in the stack, and a 2027 plan that funds the founder's feed ahead of the rooms where the second conversation happens is a plan that pays for trial and skips the purchase. Messi could not buy his way past that with 516 million followers and White Claw's trucks. A founder with a content calendar and a good week of engagement will not either.