Nov 6, 2025

SHARE: Perhaps you know the supplement brand AG1. Or maybe you know it by its original name, Athletic Greens. Regardless, the company is one of the great ecommerce adapt-and-survivors of the past 15 years. AG1 was founded in 2010 and was practically unique as a one-SKU, single-checkout ecommerce brand. In other words, it made only one item, a green powder to be mixed with water or milk, and transacted only on its own site. AG1 was an early affiliate marketing standout. The company prowled open web chum boxes, produced content marketing and commissioned blogs and creators to promote its powder. As the internet and direct-to-brand economics changed, so did the company. And the biggest changes have happened in the past year or so. One year ago was the big AG1 rebrand. And in April of this year, the company announced that it would begin selling on Amazon. One month later, the company made the brick-and-mortar jump with a Costco distribution deal. In August, AG1 doubled its product portfolio by adding a sleep supplement called AGZ. “You’ve got to really evaluate your [media] mix almost every day, but particularly when you’re on shelves and on Amazon,” AG1 CMO Paulie Dery, who joined in August 2024, told AdExchanger. AdExchanger caught up with Dery to discuss how these major shake-ups to AG1’s business and the digital media landscape will affect the company’s approach to marketing. AdExchanger: Has your media mix changed much as you add Amazon, retail stores and a new product? PAULIE DERY: You do have to change things up. For people who walk into a store, it’s a very different communication, right? The work almost has to be done before they’re in the store and see you on the shelf. They need to have that awareness and understanding of the product. When you’re DTC, you have multi-touches to educate people along the way. And when someone comes to purchase on the site, they can educate themselves as well. It’s very different phases of awareness. In terms of our mix, we’ve done a fair bit of what I’d call “big screen” lately – linear TV and some out-of-home. We’ve done radio as well. None of that was in our core DTC playbook. I’m curious about the rebrand. Even when you weren’t on Amazon, there probably was a whole category of supplements called “Athletics Greens,” which I’m sure stuffed the brand into their names, products, metadata, everywhere. How do you feel about defending your brand terms there? Look, one reason we’re on Amazon is to combat the rampant counterfeiting that was going on at the time. The thing about AG1 is we kind of created the category, and then all of these small knockoffs appeared. That’s part of the journey of being a category creator. Fine. And being on Amazon was a way to eradicate a lot of those counterfeiters. So that was an interesting part of our thinking there. The space is getting very flooded. Like I said, we created a category, then everybody floods in. And the thing is, everybody in our space does one part of AG1. They’re either probiotic, or a multivitamin, or good for your gut. We are all in one. Which allows us to be in those categories but try and separate ourselves. Social media marketing, Instagram and TikTok in particular, has gotten more difficult this year for health and wellness brands. I can imagine terms like “gut healthy” and “probiotic” being flagged or triggering campaign suspension nowadays. What are you seeing on those platforms? As the industry leader, we hold ourselves to higher standards. And there are a lot of snake oil salespeople out there with knockoff products that don’t hold themselves to any standard and make insane claims. We really worry about that, because it brings the whole industry down. What we talk about on social media is our commitment to invest $20 million over the next three years into science. [Editor’s note: AG1’s latest marketing play is a set of “NIL” deals for student scientists, a riff on the now-common practice of brands endorsing NCAA athletes.] Our AG1 formula has four clinical studies, which cost a lot of money. The process of testing and the investments we make to validate our formula are serious. For example, there’s an accreditation called NSF Certified for Sport, which essentially is a guarantee that taking a product won’t cause an athlete to fail a drug test. It is a hard accreditation to get and requires a high investment. I would love for the platforms to clamp down even harder, to be honest, because it seems like a lot of those little players do sneak under the radar. How has your creative approach changed? That’s changed the least. You’ve got to do some good foundational things when you join a new channel, like Amazon. But that’s also where general awareness and great creative really helps. If you’re doing great communication, whether that’s on TV or out of home or on Meta, it bleeds into all the channels. We don’t have a super easy product to understand: it’s a multivitamin, probiotic product with 75 ingredients. And AGZ isn’t like a knockout Ambien; it’s a melatonin-free way to wind down at the end of the day and provide restorative sleep. We have a great history as a first-mover in podcasts. It was a risky, unproven channel, but worked because it was a long-form and allowed a chance to educate people about the inner workings of the product. What about on social media, where the platforms all have AI-generated creative tools now? One thing I notice on the social platforms is, creatively, a lot of the stuff looks the same. I think that’s the algorithm and what’s being presented as best practices. The problem with that is the middle gets very big and everybody starts looking the same. People blame the competitive nature of the channels, or what’s happening with their CPMs or CACs, for example. But, actually, I think it’s a creative challenge. Long story short, make great creative that helps educate people, then let the customer decide where they want to buy.