What Cheers' Move Into Broad Reach Media Tells Us About Brand Growth
For years, Cheers built a loyal following the way most modern CPG brands start out, through social content sold direct to consumer (DTC) and on Amazon. But the specifics of how founder and CEO Brooks Powell built that following are worth diving into, because it wasn't the usual DTC playbook.
Powell started what became Cheers as a Princeton undergrad, hand packing dihydromyricetin and cysteine capsules in his dorm room after reading academic research on how those compounds interact with alcohol metabolism. That science-first origin shaped the content strategy from the start.
Rather than leaning on the standard supplement-marketing tropes of before-and-after transformations and pure hype, Powell built an audience by teaching people what actually happens in the body when they drink, what a hangover really is, and how ingredients like DHM are positioned to help the body process it. The videos functioned as genuine education first and a product pitch second, which is a much harder needle to thread than it sounds. It's easy to make DTC content that's either all substance and no hook, or all hook and no substance. Cheers found a way to be entertaining and informative at the same time, and that combination is a big part of why the content took off.
My husband and I have actually used the product ourselves, alongside a healthy dose of Drip Drop and Advil, on an adults-only getaway that promised to be a little too much fun. I won't pretend to offer a real review here, because that's always the tricky part with anything in this category. Did it work, or did I just sleep well that night? Either way, I was happy with the result!
Powell has also been unusually open about the business itself. His personal LinkedIn following grew alongside the brand because he was willing to narrate the messy parts of building a company in real time: the Shark Tank appearance where he walked away without a deal, the rebrand from the original Thrive+ name to Cheers, the fundraising rounds, the retail expansion, and the wins alongside the setbacks.
His wife, Shelby Powell, has led content and partnerships for the brand and has been just as visible in building that same audience. That transparency built trust with consumers who were increasingly skeptical of supplement claims, and it built a following among the retail buyers, brokers, and CPG operators who spend their time on LinkedIn and who Cheers would eventually need to court.
Most DTC founders treat their following as a means to a transactional end. Powell built his more like a brand asset, and that's what gave Cheers something to point broad reach media at once the moment came to scale beyond social.
But there's a ceiling to growing this way with social, and not just because some available customers don’t hang out online.
Social-first, DTC-first marketing is typically transactional by design, and it gets measured on short-term outcomes: clicks, conversions, ROAS. Cheers' strong performance on social proved the product worked and told them exactly what drove a purchase. What it couldn't do was grow the pool of people who'd ever consider buying in the first place. For that, they needed a bigger audience, and that meant brand investment.
In late 2025, Cheers started putting money into broad reach brand advertising on TV. Almost immediately, the brand's share of search spiked well above its category competitors, including No Days Wasted, a brand that had been sitting steadily above Cheers in search interest up to that point.
Share of search is one of the better leading indicators available for spotting the early impact of brand investment, well before it shows up in market share or revenue. Les Binet has written extensively about this, and it's a big part of why we lean on it with our own clients when the KPI can't be a click.
Why This Leap Is So Hard to Make
Brand investment often feels more expensive at the start vs. promotional messaging. When you're used to chasing a clean ROAS number, spending against something that won't show up in a dashboard for weeks or months can feel like a waste, even when it's working.
We see this all the time and it’s why so many e-commerce-born brands stay on the performance treadmill long after it's stopped delivering growth. The ROAS number is seductive right up until the channel is tapped out and there's no more audience left to squeeze. We call that starving the funnel and it’s a very real, very common phenomenon these days.
Distribution Is the Other Half of the Equation for Cheers
At the same time it started investing in brand, Cheers' in-store distribution took off. The brand is now sold in roughly 30,000 US locations and growing.
In-store distribution is one of the fastest compounding growth levers a CPG brand has, but it comes with a catch for a product like Cheers. A shelf facing in the hangover or liver-support set is small and easy to walk past, and that category isn't one most shoppers browse the way they might linger in the snack or drink aisle. Nobody stumbles onto a supplement they've never heard of by wandering the store. Someone has to already be looking for it, or at least recognize it when they see it, and that's exactly what broad reach media is built to create.
This is where mental availability and physical availability meet: broad reach builds the memory structures that make a brand easy to recognize, and distribution makes sure it's there on the shelf the moment that recognition kicks in. Neither one does much without the other, and for a brand with a small shelf footprint, the recognition side may matter even more than usual.
People like to think they make rational, deliberate choices in the aisle, but most of that decision making runs on something closer to instinct: does this look familiar, does it feel safe, have I seen this somewhere before? Broad reach media is what plants that familiarity before someone ever gets to the shelf.
Measuring Impact When Click-to-Buy Isn't the KPI
This is usually where brands get stuck, and it’s not an easy problem to solve. When you're purely DTC, a pixel can trace a fairly clean line from ad exposure to website visit to purchase. Once a brand moves into stores, that line disappears. A pixel can't see someone pick a product off a shelf, and CTV exposure in particular is notoriously hard to tie back to a single conversion event.
Share of search is a useful early signal, but it's just that: a signal, not proof. Once a brand has real retail distribution, we like to pair that early read with sales lift studies using a test and control, or holdout, methodology. That's what actually tells you whether the people exposed to your brand advertising are buying more than a comparable group that wasn't exposed, and it's the closest thing to ground truth once click-to-buy is off the table. We use a trusted measurement partner to create these measurement tests.
Retail media has stepped in with the promise of closed loop attribution by marrying ad exposure to an in-store purchase, but it’s still in its infancy, notoriously unreliable, and prone to deliver your ad to people already in the market to buy. Targeted media like retail media doesn’t drive the light buyers that are a necessity of brand growth.
We also don't think of brand and performance as an either/or decision. They work better together, each doing something the other can't. IPA research from Binet and Field has long pointed to something close to a 60/40 split between brand building and short-term activation as a reasonable long-term balance for most FMCG and CPG brands. Many brands balk at this mix and think they are the exception to the rule - but this ratio has held fairly steady across categories and industries.
Cheers proved itself first through "edu-tainment" content and a genuinely engaged social audience. Now it's applying that same discipline to broad reach media and letting distribution do the rest. It's a good case study in what the leap from performance to brand actually looks like in practice.
If you're feeling the plateau of performance-only marketing and aren't sure how to make the case for brand investment, or how to measure it once you do, that's exactly the kind of conversation we like to have. We can help you find the right split for your business and build a measurement approach that goes beyond click-to-buy.
We are Left Hand Agency, a CPG media buying agency helping brands grow with short and long-term strategies. Our memory-driven strategies deliver results your marketing and finance teams will champion.
