What IM8 Health spends on creators, and the names it has never booked
David Beckham's supplement brand has run 67 paid YouTube deals in eighteen months, and it rebooks its creators more often than AG1 does at forty times the size. The gap is not effort, it is which names it has not reached yet.
Senior Partnerships Manager · August 17, 2026 · 11 min read
What IM8 built in eighteen months
Most celebrity supplement brands are a face on a tub. IM8 is not built that way, and the difference shows up in the numbers further down this post, so it is worth being precise about what the brand actually assembled.
A co-founder rather than a face
David Beckham is a co-founding partner of IM8, not a hired endorser. By the company's own account he had turned down this category for years, because the pitches he kept getting were all built on him personally, and a brand that rests on one person is fragile in a way that is unfair to that person.
The product came out of his own problem. He and Victoria were taking twelve to fifteen separate supplements a day and could not keep the routine up, so the premise was to put clinically useful doses of the same things into one drink that tastes good enough to finish.
Who says so: IM8's own founder account, given in interviews. It is the company's telling of its own origin, and no outside party has checked it.
The science board is the insurance policy
The advisory board was recruited across specialties rather than only formulation, and it includes a Mayo Clinic physician and a former chief scientist at NASA. The stated test was to ask how somebody could attack the product, then close off each line of attack in advance.
That produced clinical trials from launch and NSF Certified for Sport status, which screens against roughly 280 banned substances. For a brand fronted by an athlete, that certification is not marketing, it is the thing that stops a positive test ending the whole business.
The board also does something quieter that matters more for creator work. A single famous founder gives you one story and one audience, while a dozen credentialed experts give you a dozen angles to write ads from, which is how you talk to people who do not care about football.
The athlete who came to them
Aryna Sabalenka was inbound, not bought. Her performance coach started taking the product himself in January 2025, felt a difference after about a month and passed it to her, and her team approached IM8 roughly three months later. She became a global ambassador and took equity in the company.
Who says so: Prenetics investor relations announced the ambassador and shareholder arrangement. The sequence before it comes from IM8's own account.
At her level everything is tested and logged daily, so a top ranked player putting her own money in is a stronger signal than any paid placement could be. It is also the sort of endorsement a brand cannot go out and buy, which is exactly why it is worth so much.
The ad that beat its own forecast
Ahead of the US Open, IM8 ran a campaign built almost entirely from AI generated footage, roughly 95 percent of it, with a small amount of live action, and put it on Times Square screens during the tournament. Internally the team expected three to four million views.
It reported more than 233 million on Instagram.
Who says so: the view count is company reported, from a Prenetics and IM8 press release, and it does not separate paid delivery from organic or connect any of it to sales. MediaPost reported the production split and the Times Square placement separately.
That is a genuine result and it should be read carefully. A view count that large tells you the top of the funnel worked. It tells you nothing about what any of it cost to acquire a customer, which is the number that decides whether it happens again.
What we can see in our own data
We track sponsored YouTube videos and who paid for them, currently across roughly 700,000 videos. That gives an outside view of IM8's creator programme that does not depend on anything the company chooses to publish.
Sixty seven deals, nineteen creators
Between 29 December 2024 and 15 June 2026 we have 67 recorded paid YouTube deals for IM8, spread across 19 separate channels.
For a brand that is eighteen months old, that is a real programme rather than a pilot. It is also small enough that every individual booking decision still shows.
Three names carry more than half of it
Raphael Reiter has 14 of those deals, The Proof with Simon Hill has 13, and She's So Lucky has 10. Those three carry 37 of the 67 deals between them, which is 55 percent of the programme coming from 16 percent of the roster.
Ten of the 19 creators have been booked exactly once.
That shape is not a criticism, it is what a working programme looks like early on. You find a few channels that convert, you go back to them, and the rest of the roster is still a test. The question it raises is whether the concentration is a choice or a ceiling, and the next section is our answer.
The repeat rate is genuinely good
IM8 rebooks 47.4 percent of its creators, at an average of 3.5 bookings each, and three creators have been booked ten or more times.
Set that against the brand every supplement founder measures themselves by. AG1 has 1,102 creators and 3,121 recorded deals, and it rebooks 46.5 percent of them at 2.8 bookings each. IM8 is slightly ahead of AG1 on both measures while running a roster one fortieth the size.
LMNT is the one to actually copy. It has 413 creators and 2,625 deals, rebooks 64 percent of them, and books each one 6.4 times on average. That is a brand that decides who works and then buys them repeatedly instead of spreading thin.
Who says so: our own database of recorded YouTube sponsor reads, pulled 18 August 2026. Deal counts are what we captured from video descriptions.
The programme is accelerating
IM8 ran 11 recorded deals in the six months to October 2025, and 39 in the six months to April 2026.
That is more than a tripling, and it lines up with the company saying it wants to move spend off Meta, where it sits at roughly 85 percent of its mix, and onto YouTube and TikTok before the end of the year.
The names IM8 has never booked
This is the part that is only visible from outside, because it requires knowing what every competitor did.
What the category has already agreed on
We pooled thirteen brands that compete with IM8 on the same shelf: AG1, LMNT, Ritual, Huel, Seed, Armra, Momentous, Ka'Chava, Live it Up, Thorne, Field of Greens, Bloom Nutrition and Bulletproof. Together they have paid 2,418 creators across 10,800 recorded deals since May 2021.
Fifty eight of those creators have been paid by four or more of the thirteen. One has been paid by six.
IM8 has booked one of the 58. That creator is Dominique Sachse.
Those 58 names are the closest thing this category has to a verdict. Every one of them has had four or more separate supplement brands independently decide the audience converts, spend money to find out, and in most cases come back. When IM8 goes shopping for scale, these are the people it ends up bidding against, and it is currently bidding for almost none of them.
The lane everyone is crowded into
Health channels are the most worn out pocket on this shelf. Just 207 of them carry 2,019 of the deals, an average of 9.8 each, and twelve of the thirteen brands are already buying there.
A health audience on YouTube has been sold a greens powder nine or ten times. That does not mean it stops working, it means you pay a premium for a viewer who has heard the pitch before, and you compete on price against brands with deeper pockets.
Six of IM8's 19 creators sit in that lane.
The lanes nobody has touched
The same pool has pockets almost nobody has entered, and they map unusually well onto what IM8 has said it is launching next.
Gaming has 43 creators and 71 deals, an average of 1.7 each, and only three of the thirteen brands have ever bought a placement there. Parenting has 11 creators and seven brands. Family has 15 creators and six. Fitness, which is where a creatine launch belongs, has 28 creators against health's 207. Outdoors has 28 creators and five brands.
IM8 has said it is launching hydration, creatine and kids' gummies. Hydration belongs in sports and outdoors, creatine belongs in fitness, and kids' gummies belong in parenting and family. Those are four of the five quietest lanes on the entire shelf.
A creator in one of them has almost certainly never been pitched a supplement, and that shows up in what they quote.
Fifty eight creators on this shelf have been paid by four or more of thirteen rival brands. IM8 has booked one of them.
This is the part where a brand usually asks us to just hand over the list, and it is a reasonable thing to want. We build exactly that: the names, what each rival paid them, their recent average views, and an estimated cost per video, so a team can decide from a spreadsheet instead of a hunch. Finding the names is the easy half. Knowing which ones are already locked to a competitor is the half that saves money.
What the numbers do not show
Anyone can present a data pull as though it settles the question. Here is where ours does not.
Only 23 of the 67 deals carry view data
We have view counts for 23 of IM8's 67 recorded deals, totalling 2.2 million views, 39,401 likes and 1,792 comments.
That means roughly two thirds of the programme cannot be measured from outside at all. Any claim about how IM8's creator videos performed overall, including ours, is built on a third of the evidence.
An affiliate link is not a sponsorship
Gazey Fitness shows up with 5 recorded IM8 deals. That channel also mentions IM8 in 122 of its 153 videos, which is 80 percent.
A mention rate that high is not 122 paid reads, it is a standing affiliate link sitting in the description. The language does not separate them either, because a discount code and a percentage off appear in affiliate boilerplate exactly as often as in a paid placement. The rate comparison is the only reliable test, and it is the sort of thing that quietly inflates a competitor analysis if nobody checks.
YouTube is not the whole picture
Every number in this post is YouTube only. IM8 runs an ambassador programme paying 10 percent commission on new customer orders, a separate user generated content intake, and a creator event in Miami that drew close to 150 people.
None of that appears in our data. A brand spending heavily on Instagram or TikTok reads as thin here, and that thinness is about our coverage rather than about the brand.
Who says so: the ambassador commission and the content intake terms are published on IM8's own site. The Miami event attendance is company reported.
Nobody publishes what a creator actually returned
This is the real gap, and it is not IM8's alone. The company has published reach and growth figures, and it has not published which creators produced customers, what a first order cost, or whether creator acquired buyers renew better or worse than paid social ones.
Without that, a 233 million view campaign and a quiet 40,000 view sponsor read are argued about on instinct. The brands that fix this first stop guessing which half of the budget works, and it usually turns out to be neither half anyone expected.
What we would do next
Three things, in order.
Buy into the proven list before rivals lock it up. Fifty eight names have four or more supplement brands behind them, IM8 has one, and those relationships get more expensive every quarter somebody else books them first.
Put the new products where the shelf is empty. Creatine into fitness, hydration into sports and outdoors, gummies into parenting and family. These are small pockets rather than hidden goldmines, so the point is not volume, it is that nobody has taught those creators what a supplement placement is worth yet.
Copy LMNT's repeat discipline rather than AG1's spread. IM8's 47.4 percent rebook rate says it already knows how to pick. Booking 6.4 times instead of 3.5 is a decision about conviction, not about budget.
If you are weighing the same choices, the work we do is the unglamorous middle: finding which creators your competitors already pay, checking who is locked into an exclusivity you cannot see from outside, and getting a real rate rather than a rate card. It is also worth reading our guide to disclosure rules for creator campaigns before any of it goes live, because supplement claims are the fastest way to turn a good campaign into a problem.
For the wider picture, the thirteen brand shelf analysis shows where every rival is buying, which drink brands rebook their creators covers the same question in beverages, and the full list of the biggest YouTube sponsors puts all of it in context.