Influencer marketing intelligence report
What we analysed: 97 brands in the Protein Coffee & Shake niche, 200 top creators across Instagram and TikTok, and 100 top niche ad creatives, over a 181-day category window (29 December 2025 to 28 June 2026) and a matching brand window covering PRÉS's own feed and Creator Tagged Posts.
PRÉS is one of the smallest brands in the niche by audience, rank 88 of 97 on Instagram followers, yet it sits mid-pack on the creator conversation: rank 41 of 97 by Creator Tagged Posts (Instagram and TikTok posts where a creator tagged the brand inside the window) and rank 57 by Total Creator Views. For a 3,200-follower brand to pull more creator posts than two-thirds of a category that includes Super Coffee and Throne Sport Coffee is the genuinely interesting part. The thing it does not have is any paid presence at all.
The follower count says small brand; the creator footprint says something else, and the zero in the Active Meta ads column is the cleanest gap in the row, which is exactly what the rest of this report works through.
Read across the brand window and one motion does all the work. Twenty-one creators tagged PRÉS, and fifteen of the twenty-two posts carry a #partnership disclosure sourced through the Hummingbirds local-creator network, clustered into five metro pods, Atlanta, Houston, Kansas City, Oklahoma City and Orlando, each tied to a nearby Sprouts. This is a deliberate gifting and seeding programme stacked on top of geo-clustered micro-creator activations, and for a brand this size it is sharp work.
Because the calibration here is strong, twenty-one unique creators tagging in the window, the right way to read the paid versus organic split is amplification, not absence. PRÉS is already generating the exact creator-style content the rest of the category pays to manufacture, and seven of the posts carry no partnership tag at all, genuine earned mentions around the Sprouts launch. The interesting question this raises is why none of that content is being pushed any further than a single organic view.
The audience the content reaches for is consistent: health-conscious busy professionals and parents chasing convenient protein (about 40% of the personas the posts target), then millennial women in boutique fitness and wellness, then the calmer "that girl" morning-routine crowd. The best engagement comes from the smallest accounts, @mishuleopardi at 17.4% on a Sprouts review and @novbarnett at 4.8% on a quiet cold-brew reel, which is the signal worth amplifying.
Twenty-one creators tagged PRÉS in the window and most of them did it through one gifted pod motion tied to Sprouts, the position competitors run paid budgets trying to reach. The engine works; it just stops at the edge of each creator's own feed.
| Brand | IG followers | Creator Tagged Posts | Unique creators | Total Creator Views | Active Meta ads |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.2K | 18 | 17 | 21K | 0 | |
Javvy | 237K | 50 | 44 | 262K | 511 |
Super Coffee | 109K | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Chike | 54K | 11 | 9 | 69K | 20 |
Throne Sport Coffee | 27K | 3 | 3 | 5K | 5 |
Inside the Protein Coffee and Proffee sub-set, Javvy is the brand PRÉS is genuinely racing. It carries 237K followers, 50 Creator Tagged Posts, and the most active Meta ad library of any brand in the dataset. The other proffee names are quieter, Super Coffee has gone almost silent on creators despite its following, so the sharpest plays in this category come from the wider niche, where the volume operators live.
JavvyThe head-to-head, and a paid machine. Javvy runs 511 live ad creatives, the most of any brand here, whitelists creator handles into partnership ads, and still pulls 50 Creator Tagged Posts from 44 creators. It became a household coffee name on the back of creator volume.
Alani NuThe category's creator giant. Alani Nu pulled 500 Creator Tagged Posts from 330 creators, and crucially it concentrates: creators like heathergets_healthy posted 17 times, blairelatham7 14 times, a de-facto retainer core inside a huge volume play.
RYZE SuperfoodsThe paid-creative benchmark in functional coffee. RYZE runs 483 live ad creatives with 144 of them past 90 days, including 320-day cinematic mushroom-mascot films, and feeds the top of that funnel with 65 gifted creators.
TRIPThe broadest creator base in the dataset. TRIP works with 84 unique creators across 91 Creator Tagged Posts and backs it with 289 live ad creatives, a wide-net creator collective rather than a concentrated bench.
The biggest names in this niche each stack three or four creator plays at once, with Alani Nu running a retainer core inside a 330-creator collective; PRÉS is genuinely strong on two of those plays already, which is why the opportunity later is about adding, not starting.
Start with scale. Across this niche there are 3,798 active ad creatives from 51 advertisers, and only about 11% of all creatives survive past 60 days, in line with the wider industry. The question is what makes that 11%. Among the longest-running creatives, creator-shot UGC is the single most over-indexed style, 41% of the 60-plus-day winners against 36% of the full top set. The ads that last in this category are filmed by people, not studios.
The durability is real. Bulk keeps a lifestyle creative running 622 days and Humantra a product carousel for 616, but the creator-shot survivors are the instructive ones: MaxiNutrition has a single UGC UGC for paid ads testimonial live for 500 days, Humantra a 367-day UGC piece, and RYZE three cinematic mascot films past 320 days each. This is compounding creative, not a one-off.
Who commissions at volume? The advertisers running the category are doing it at a cadence only a creator pipeline can feed: Humantra at 426 active creatives with three-quarters refreshed inside 30 days, Javvy at 365, TRIP at 273, Legion at 232, several at a near-total fresh-creative pace. This is testing, not posting.
Where does PRÉS sit? It commissions zero creator content for paid and runs no Meta ads in the US at all, while already producing exactly the creator-style content the category licenses into spend through its gifting pods. The raw material exists; none of it is being put behind a dollar.
At least ten brands in this category are running 10+ live ad creatives with more than half refreshed in the last 30 days, Humantra at 426 (74% fresh), Javvy at 365 (56%), TRIP at 273 (70%). PRÉS commissions zero creator content for paid. The gap isn't budget; it's a creator pipeline producing enough variants to test at category cadence.
Across the 181-day brand window PRÉS published just 14 posts on its own channels, 9 on Instagram and 5 on TikTok, about one every fortnight. The average own post draws 36 likes and the typical one 28, numbers that read as an early account still finding reach, and the low cadence is the first thing the data flags. The brand's creators are out-posting and out-performing the brand's own feed several times over.
By format the signal is sharp. The brand's three carousels average 69 likes, its two photos 32, and its nine videos just 26, so the most-published format on the feed is also the weakest, while the format that works best is barely used. By pillar the feed leans hard on Promotional, 7 of 14 posts, and those promotional posts do hold up at 46 average likes, but the lighter Relatable and Meme content (35 likes) and the calmer Inspirational routine posts (20 likes) round out a feed that is doing too little, too rarely.
Read these as a creative brief. They are the own-feed posts PRÉS's audience rewarded most across the window.
The lead post is a carousel, and that is the pattern across the window: carousels and the lighter, phone-first formats outrun straight video on this feed, and lower-production content tends to win. The top post at 149 likes is more than four times the typical own post, a reminder of how much headroom sits unused at this posting volume.
The instruction the data gives the content team is simple: post far more often, lean into carousels and relatable creator-style video, and let the gifted pod creators carry the volume the brand's own feed cannot.
Across the 6-month brand window PRÉS published just 14 own posts, about one every fortnight, and carousels earned 2.7 times the likes of videos (69 vs 26) while video made up nine of the fourteen. The feed is both starved and skewed to its weakest format, while creator-tagged content carries the brand.
These eight are drawn from the 200 top creators in the Protein Coffee & Shake niche over the 181-day window, ranked by Total Creator Views, filtered to a spread of reach tiers and platforms with the feed weighted to Instagram, and every one has already posted about a direct competitor. None has posted about PRÉS, so the relationship would start fresh. The micro tier in the top-views pool is thin, so the list leans toward proven mid creators.
Combined, these eight reach 3.9M followers and pulled 15.3M Creator Tagged Post views in the niche over the window. All eight have already posted about a direct competitor, and none has ever posted about PRÉS.
The category runs 3,798 active ad creatives across 51 advertisers; PRÉS runs zero. Creator-shot UGC over-indexes among the ads that survive past 60 days, and PRÉS already produces it organically through its gifting pods, just never behind a dollar.
PRÉS's 21 gifted creators make strong native content that dies after one organic view. Javvy built a household name by whitelisting creator handles into paid Partnership Ads. Putting spend behind content the brand already commissions compounds a working motion.
PRÉS spreads across 21 creators at roughly one post each; the category's leaders concentrate. David Protein runs one creator to 20 posts, Orgain and Alani Nu to 17 and 18 each. Signing the top five Hummingbirds performers compounds an engine that already works.
PRÉS has just four Creator Tagged Posts and five own posts on TikTok across six months. Javvy became a household coffee brand on TikTok, and Alani Nu and MyProtein field dozens of creators there. A standing squad is where proffee discovery now happens.
PRÉS already runs five metro creator pods, Atlanta, Houston, Kansas City, Oklahoma City and Orlando, each tied to a local Sprouts. The model is proven: gifted micros drive in-store discovery at the exact doors carrying the product. Add pods market by market as retail expands.
PRÉS gifts creators once and has no standing ambassador roster. Alani Nu and 1st Phorm convert loyal creators into long-term ambassadors who post for months. A small always-on tier gives the brand a reliable monthly content base between launches.
We built this report because PRÉS's creator data is genuinely interesting, a tiny brand already running a sharp gifted-creator motion across five metros with almost no paid behind it, and we wanted to share what we found. If any of this is useful or you'd like the full creator list behind the numbers, happy to send it over.
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