How IM8 runs ads: the premium flip on Gruns
IM8 ran roughly 1,200 ads concurrently to hit ~$100M in a year - taking Gruns' playful green playbook and flipping it into a sleek, red, clinical, celebrity-backed premium brand.
Scale
~$100M
in roughly one year
Concurrent ads
~1,200
to sustain volume
Co-signs
Beckham +
Giannis, Sabalenka
AOV trick
Quarterly
low monthly price, paid upfront
How IM8 actually runs ads
IM8 is a premium nutrition powder. It looks like the expensive, science-y version of greens.
Where Gruns is playful and green, IM8 is sleek and red, and it borrows trust from famous athletes like David Beckham.
Its ads tell you it's not your fault you feel tired or foggy - then offer a 'low monthly price' that you actually pay three months at a time, plus a pile of free gifts to make the price feel small.
The funnel
Walk the funnel, stage by stage
Click through the four stages to see how the hook, destination, offer and retention chain together.
Guilt-removal + celebrity authority
Ads open by absolving the viewer ('it's not your fault you feel off...') and borrow credibility from athlete co-signs, framing IM8 as the premium, clinically-backed fix.
Signature move
Guilt-removal copy
The angles
The angle set
IM8's symptom-led angles all route through guilt-removal and premium proof.
"It's not your fault your brain feels slow by 2pm."
Why it works
The four levers behind the scale
IM8 didn't reinvent the powder - it reinvented the brand. Sleek red + clinical claims + athlete co-signs created a premium lane next to Gruns' playful green, capturing a buyer the gummy didn't.
Steal this
The IM8 playbook
moves you're running
The takeaway
The premium variant
IM8 proves the Gruns skeleton scales upmarket: same congruent-funnel logic, inverted aesthetics, premium proof, and AOV engineering to fund a higher CPA.
If Gruns shows the persona-volume play, IM8 shows the price-architecture play. Most $100M supplement scalers run some blend of the two.
Sources
What we read to build this
Related Shuttergen reading
Where to go next
The connected pages that compound on this one.
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