Joe Rogan, ONNIT, and Alpha Brain - Why was this so successful?
The insane popularity of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast helped introduce the world to dozens of personalities from MMA, Comedy, Science, Fitness, Politics, Conspiracy theories, and more.
The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, which gets 200 million downloads per month, has helped catapult many of his guests AND their products into the mainstream.
You don’t have to be very business savvy to imagine just how much money these businesses have been able to generate as a result of this “Rogan effect.”
One of those businesses I happen to be super familiar with is Onnit, a health & fitness brand where I was the company’s first Chief Marketing Officer from 2012 - 2017. During my time at Onnit, I witnessed firsthand how Joe Rogan’s massive influence disrupted an entire industry, creating countless jobs and a huge amount of wealth for many people downstream.
I want to talk about my time at Onnit to try to explain exactly what made the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast propel Onnit into a global phenomenon that was eventually purchased by Unilever to the tune of NINE FIGURES.
See, over the years since working at Onnit, I’ve had countless people come to me asking to help them grow their company, usually saying something like, “Just do what you guys did at Onnit.” Which, as I’ll try to explain in this video is an IMPOSSIBLY oversimplified point of view.
So the goal really for this video is to shine some light on how this whole thing worked, which should hopefully help some of you business owners and marketing professionals out there learn a few things about building a brand with a mega influencer like Joe Rogan.
So, for those who aren’t familiar with the Onnit - JRE backstory, it all started when Onnit founder, Aubrey Marcus became friends with Joe Rogan around 2009ish, which was right around the time that both the JRE and Onnit were getting going.
Rogan, a standup comedian, actor, and UFC commentator was posting episodes of the JRE from his home in Los Angeles, where he’d mostly get high with his buddies and talk about everything from comedy and MMA to conspiracy theories. People loved the intimate vibe and incredibly honest long-form conversation of the JRE, which helped it grow in popularity, creating a cult following along the way.
Aubrey, a former athlete and entrepreneur, grew up in a household where nutritional supplements were kinda an everyday thing. He continued to experiment with different formulas well into his adult years as he constantly was trying to gain a competitive edge. He launched Onnit with an initial line of supplements formulated around recovery which had some limited initial success.
When Aubrey and Joe met, they had an immediate connection with their shared love of health and fitness, MMA, and of course, nutritional supplements.
Aubrey became a regular guest on the podcast, as the two worked together to develop a product in a then mostly unknown category of cognitive enhancing supplements called, Nootropics.
After a lot of R&D, they came up with the formula for Alpha Brain, our flagship product that went on to become a worldwide phenomenon, making Onnit a massive brand with a complete line of supplements, foods, and fitness equipment loved by everyone from elite athletes to everyday folks just trying to make themselves a little bit better.
So that’s the super-condensed history of Onnit and Joe Rogan, and I’m sure most people can understand at least in broad strokes how a celebrity endorsement can help make a brand successful, but in my experience, most people REALLY don’t understand all the behind the scenes stuff that makes things like this work.
And I’ve seen plenty of brands make the mistake of cutting giant checks to influencers who simply have a large following expecting the money to just pour in after the check clears.
That wasn’t the case with Onnit. It’s actually a lot more complex than that.
OK, so before we get into the specifics, I have to set the stage to help illustrate the absolutely perfect set of circumstances that were happening at the time before any of us got involved.
Circumstance Number 1 - The Emerging New Media of Podcasting
So rewind to somewhere in the early 2010s when podcasting was still in its infancy. The rising popularity of the iPhone and other smartphones exposed a massive amount of people to the format of Podcasting for the first time.
And while podcasting had technically been around for years, smartphones were the thing that made it easier than ever for people to discover and stream podcasts anytime they wanted to.
In those early days of podcasting, there weren’t a ton of high-quality options to choose from, and as more and more people started to discover what a podcast was, a little name recognition from a known TV personality certainly didn’t hurt The JRE’s chances to stand out.
Circumstance Number 2 - The Explosion of the UFC
Next, you can’t talk about the JRE without the UFC. The Ultimate Fighting Championship, which has been around since the 1990s, really didn’t start to go mainstream until right around 2005 with the launch of the reality show, The Ultimate Fighter.
Since then, the UFC has rapidly risen to become one of the most popular sports in the world. Which according to Neilson, is the 3rd most popular sport in the world behind only soccer and basketball. And right there ringside commentating on most of the biggest fights, was our buddy, Joe Rogan.
This drove thousands of new UFC fans to the JRE podcast as MMA rocketed to the top of the national conversation. The JRE became the defacto place for intelligent, in-depth analysis of the fights, as well as THE place for fighters to appear as guests,
Circumstance Number 3 - New Thinking in Diet & Exercise
One of the biggest cultural shifts in the 2010s was how the world started to change its views on diet and exercise. We saw the rise of diet trends like Paleo, Keto, Caveman, and Whole30. On the fitness side, big box gyms started to lose ground to alternative, group focussed training like Crossfit, Spin classes, obstacle course training, and hot yoga, while also discovering new types of fitness equipment like kettlebells and battle ropes.
During this time, as people were starting to open their minds to new types of health ideology, some of those same people began to go deeper, discovering all kinds of new ideas and technology to further optimize themselves, giving birth to the whole Bio-Hacking movement.
Circumstance Number 4 - The Movie “Limitless”
Ok so this is kinda a weird one, but it’s important. In 2011, a movie came out called, Limitless. The movie, starring Bradley Cooper and Robert Deniro, was about a struggling writer who discovers a pill that allows him to access 100% of his brain power, vastly improving his life and wealth.
The film was a pretty big hit, but more importantly, for the sake of this article, it helped introduce a huge part of the world to the concept of smart drugs or “nootropics.”
Oh, you know what also came out in 2011? Alpha Brain.
Now, to be clear, I’m not saying Alpha Brain can give people superhuman brain power, and in fact, we were very careful to never make claims like that or ever compare Alpha Brain to that movie, BUT, the film did provide a pop-culture reference for people to help spread the word about Alpha Brain.
Trust me, it’s hard enough to launch ANY new product, but when you also have to educate customers about a whole new product category, it’s exponentially harder.
So obviously, the circumstances for this partnership were pretty opportune. Now let’s quickly talk about the hard numbers of how many people the JRE reaches.
To put things in context, let’s compare the show’s reach to some of the more traditional media institutions that most people think of As HUGE.
Let’s start with The Tonight Show, which back when Johnny Carson hosted, it was famous for turning unknown guests into household names overnight. Carson’s Tonight Show would regularly receive 9 Million viewers per episode. In contrast, according to Wikipedia, as of January 2023, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon averages only about 1.3 million viewers.
The most popular scripted TV show of 2023 was Yellowstone, which averaged 11.6 million viewers.
Moving to sports,
The clinching Game 5 of the 2023 World Series had about eleven and a half million viewers tune in.
The 2023 NBA finals - AVERAGED 11.6 M viewers per game
The most viewed Television show in the US is the NFL’s Sunday night football, which gets about 22 million viewers on average.
And the most famous TV event for drawing viewers in the US each year, The Superbowl, drew in an all-time record in 2023 with, 115M viewers.
And except for talk shows like The Tonight Show, all those other sports events only happen over a few months a year.
The Joe Rogan Experience posts 3 or 4 episodes PER WEEK, ALL YEAR ROUND, AND he averages around 11 million downloads on each of those episodes CONSISTENTLY.
Ok, so now we’ve got a reference for how big Rogan’s reach is, but that’s only one-half of the Rogan effect.
There are plenty of other influencers out there with huge followings. So let’s look now at what is it about the JRE that makes his influence so unique. And how he got so big in the first place.
First Joe Rogan has been able to do something truly incredible with his audience. He’s been able to create an audience that intersects across many different popular genres. think about it, if you’re into comedy, MMA, health & fitness, politics, alternative news, psychedelics, bow hunting, productivity, conspiracy theories, or even Bigfoot, there’s a pretty good chance Joe has content that you’d be into.
On top of that, there are a few things that also separate Rogan from other mass media.
Mainly, he’s unique because of the intense bond he’s created with his listeners. And that bond creates trust. Rogan has done a fantastic job of creating a bond with his audience because he comes from a place of genuine curiosity. He seeks out guests that he finds personally interesting and talks to them not like a typical journalist would, but more like how one of us would. Because of that bond with his listeners, he’s got ACTUAL influence.
We believe that he’s one of us and that he won’t steer us the wrong way. And we trust that if he brings someone on his show, they’re worth us paying attention to. And because we’ve built that trust with Joe, by proxy, we now trust his guest. (unless they suck on his show)
And even when he’s made mistakes in the past trusting people or claims that later turn out to be…less than perfect. He generally does a pretty good job talking about his mistakes openly, which then builds even more trust with his audience.
Also, podcasts aren’t like traditional broadcast TV or Radio, where you just flip it on and absorb whatever is being pushed out passively. Consider how people are not only able to listen to any podcast in the world at the time of their choosing, but they also have access to almost every popular song ever recorded, and they CHOOSE to listen to HIS show.
That active intentionality of the listener means they’re much more likely to absorb what’s being said on the show because they’re listening to the show on THEIR terms.
On top of that, his shows are regularly over 2 and a half hours long, which doesn’t allow him or his guests to hide much of anything.
Compare that to the more traditional talk shows where guests usually spend about 5 minutes going through their carefully rehearsed spiel. On the JRE show, for better or worse, listeners can get a really good understanding of Joe and his guest after 2 hours.
Joe’s unscripted and genuine curiosity about a subject naturally creates a show where the guest basically becomes the world’s best (or worst) salesman of themselves and their products, because I don’t care how good your act is, after a couple of hours of talking, listeners know what you’re about.
Take all of that into account, and There aren’t many platforms on earth that have that kind of influence.
So when there’s a guest on the JRE, The guest kinda becomes the ad. That person is the “product” and whatever they’re ACTUALLY selling, whether it’s a product, a service, a book, a political philosophy, or tickets to a show, it’s getting some of the most effective “free” advertising money CANT buy.
I know that sounds like hyperbole but think about it. What other media outlets have:
A - the multi-genre reach
B - The trust
C - the active intentionality of listening to a podcast
D- the intimacy of a message going right into your earbuds
E- the depth and length of his shows
F - The consistency of viewership which isn’t tied to some once-a-year event
OK now that we’ve covered the circumstances for this to work, the reach of the show, and what makes JRE listeners so bought in, now let’s talk about why it worked so well specifically for Onnit.
First and foremost, Rogan is a very savvy dude, and he knew that if he was going to put the trust of his audience on the line by attaching his name to a product, he wanted to be damn sure that it worked.
He also knew that once he started talking about Alpha Brain on the show organically, his influence could mean massive adoption of the product.
Aubrey also knew this, so early in their discussions, Aubrey agreed to make Joe a partner in the company.
And because Rogan helped develop the original formula for Alpha Brain, he was genuinely excited to share it with the world. And he did. A lot.
He’d frequently start the JRE off talking about Onnit and Alpha Brain, and specifically what the products did for him.
We never wrote a script for Joe. That was always all him. The authenticity that comes across when someone talks about their specific experience with your product ALWAYS comes through to the listener. And the value of that authenticity cannot be understated.
Also, because the show would frequently veer into the topic of health, Alpha Brain would organically work its way into the conversation, and those organic moments are absolutely invaluable as compared to a scripted ad read.
Speaking of ad reads, as the JRE got more and more popular, advertisers began to take notice. As advertiser interest increased over the years, Joe’s did a really good job of promoting brands that he was into and made sense for his audience. But he also did a really good job of limiting the number of advertisers on the show, so as to not overly saturate the show and piss off his listeners. Because of that limited supply of ad slots, this made the ads more valuable and impactful.
I’m not going to comment on how much Joe charges for these ads, but given the case I’ve laid out in this video, you can imagine they’re not cheap.
So, Onnit obviously benefitted tremendously from the consistent amount of “free” advertising that it received over the years. But not just on the JRE. Because Onnit made great apparel, Joe had no problem wearing Onnit gear everywhere he went.
He’d frequently be seen at UFC weigh-ins and other public appearances sporting our shirts which further exposed the Onnit name to the masses.
You can’t really put a price tag on that level of promotion, and that definitely provided us with all the dry powder for this thing to explode.
so we had this huge machine constantly feeding us new potential customers, and that was definitely enough to convince a lot of people to buy. But in marketing any product, it’s easy to get someone to buy the product once, but getting them to come back is another story.
And here’s where we took over.
Onnit founder, Aubrey Marcus was a very smart dude. He knew there was a gap in the supplement industry for people like him.
There were hundreds of clinical-looking, stripped-down, brands out there and a few natural-looking ones with pictures of plants and herbs on them, but nothing with a lifestyle that spoke to younger millennials like him.
And he knew his shit about supplements, he was kinda a biohacker that was always trying out different formulas of raw ingredients and reading up on the latest studies on PUBMED to learn about the latest science in the world of sports performance, and he knew more people like him were generally disappointed with what was out there.
He and Rogan both knew the market was ripe for a brand to come along and do it right.
Especially given the state of the supplement industry at the time.
Nutritional supplements in general always kinda had a dicey reputation for making wild, unsubstantiated claims, and often got busted for selling stuff that turned out to not even have the ingredients it said they had in them.
So Aubrey wanted to create products with cutting-edge formulas and scientifically proven ingredients built by an aspirational brand that people could identify with.
He believed in Alpha Brain so much in fact, that he commissioned a double-blind placebo controlled study from the Boston Center for Memory, to study the efficacy of Alpha Brain, which sounds like a smart thing to do, except for the fact that when you commission studies like that, no matter what the outcome is, the results are going to be published.
That created a pretty tense situation while we were awaiting the results, but thankfully the study ended up proving Alpha Brain was effective.
But no matter how much scientific evidence you throw at people, supplements still have a bad rap, and we had plenty of people calling us snake oil salesmen and much much worse.
Before I get into how we strategically combatted the supplement brand stigma, I’ll spend a minute trying to defend Alpha Brain a bit.
Here’s the thing, like I mentioned before, getting someone to buy a pill that promises to increase cognitive function is easy enough to do one time. But Alpha Brain isn’t cheap. A 30-day supply is like $70. We had TONS of people who bought it every month, and we got hundreds of emails from thrilled customers telling us how Alpha Brain changed their lives.
To be perfectly honest with you, Alpha Brain didn’t work for everyone, but we never wanted people to feel like they got ripped off, so we made the “Keep it” policy which offered a no-questions asked, money-back guarantee if customers felt like any of the supplements Onnit sold didn’t work for them.
So, for anyone who still doubts the efficacy of Onnit products, as most any business owner will tell you, you just can’t operate a successful business if people don’t come back.
OK enough about that, we definitely stood behind our supplements. But we knew if we really wanted to create something awesome, we had to be bigger than just a “supplement brand.”
So we started making foods and fitness equipment to help complement the supplements and came up with a tagline that we felt represented the lifestyle we were trying to convey, Total Human Optimization.
Under that moniker, we went on to produce protein powders, food bars, a line of performance apparel, a world-class training facility, and lots of different fitness equipment like battle ropes and kettlebells. Because you just can’t argue with the efficacy of lifting heavy shit.
Once we had all that built into the brand, we had a machine that attracted some of the best talent in the world who were literally moving across the country to work for us.
That Onnit team was some of the most talented and dedicated people I’ve EVER worked with. And the culture of self-improvement and positivity that we cultivated at that company, made people even more dedicated to the brand once they started making undeniably positive changes in their own lives.
The secret sauce
Ok so, if you’re still with me, you’ve got MOST of the formula to create the Onnit success story. And if you’re tracking the recipe so far, here’s the real secret sauce:
In my 20 or so years as a marketer, I’ve worked with a lot of different companies. And most of those companies make their marketing decisions based on profitability.
How much does it cost, how much did it make as a result of that cost, (return on investment). This means that marketing decisions revolve around profitability, if we don’t make money doing something, we don’t do it again. If we did make money, let’s keep doing it. I know complex stuff.
And, generally speaking, when you’re marketing any product, the cost to gain a customer, or cost per acquisition (CPA) is one of the most important metrics you measure. Depending on the business, what that business can afford to spend to acquire a customer determines what marketing tactics you employ.
Most businesses spend money on some sort of advertising to get in front of potential customers to achieve as low a CPA as possible. And this is usually one of the biggest expenses a business faces, especially in the early phases.
But here’s the thing, when you have to make brand decisions in this way, you’re always thinking about the bottom line. Which inevitably leads to various degrees of the “safer choice”. And safe choices, are rarely disruptive and more often, are kinda compromising when it comes to creativity.
But because we had an insane firehose of warmed-up customers coming in from the JRE for “free” our CPA was essentially zero.
Well, Free is only kinda true, see since Rogan was cut in on the business, Aubrey strategically gave up a huge amount of future money if the business ever sold. So, Onnit’s cost per acquisition in those early days was actually more like a deferred cost.
And because of that firehose, we were fortunate enough to make brand decisions that strictly adhered to the mission and the vision of the brand. Profitability obviously mattered, (we had to pay the bills.) But we had the luxury to never having to make marketing decisions at the cost of compromising the mission.
And that’s how we were able to uncover the secret to creating a mega-successful company with a fanatical following:
Only do cool shit.
So that’s what we did.
We knew that making kettlebells modeled after apes, zombies, werewolves, superheroes, and Stormtroopers wouldn’t ever make a ton of money, the cost to ship those things made sure of that.
We knew it would be years before we recouped any of the money that it cost us to build a world-class training facility with a state-of-the-art cryotherapy chamber.
We knew that having highly skilled, full-time artists on staff who painted crazy-weird psychedelic graphic t-shirts had nothing to do with supplements.
But we did that shit anyway because it was cool.
And because they were cool, our weird kettlebells were all over the internet, exposing our brand to millions of new people.
And because it was cool, the Onnit Gym, brought countless professional athletes and celebrities to work out at our HQ all the time, and then they’d post about us on social media.
And because those graphic t-shirts were cool, people got that shit tattooed on their bodies.
And because it was all cool, some people started becoming customers just because they thought our bold marketing decisions, which were clearly not profitable, were very cool.
That created a positive feedback loop which then allowed us to stay true to that mission, and only do even cooler shit.
Because we were doing such cool stuff, other cool people wanted to work with us, and work for us, which then made the brand stronger and cooler, and so on and so on.
So, as the JRE continued to grow with each new episode, it kept Onnit constantly stocked with new people, and then with our perfect combo of brand and products, we were able to take it the rest of the way.
That initial brand awareness from the JRE gave us a tremendous head start, but It wasn’t too long until we started winning over new customers completely outside the Rogan-verse with our effective products and bold marketing tactics. And that one-two combo became unstoppable.
So it’s not quite as simple as “Just do what you guys did for Onnit”
The reality is, that the formula behind insane brand success stories Onnit is a much more complex interconnected mix of several things:
There are uncontrollable circumstances like timing, emerging technology, and shifts in cultural trends.
And then there are smart and talented people who recognize opportunity, trust their intuition, create effective products, compellingly present them, build a lifestyle around those products, adapt to adversity, work their asses off, and never compromise the mission.
So, we had a perfect set of cultural circumstances
We had products that were proven to work
and we had an incredibly talented and passionate team of people all dedicated to the mission
But also, yea….Joe Rogan.