Real American Beer takes its community programme live on Fox Business

Varney asked whether the brand does any ordinary advertising. The answer was no, and the reasoning behind it is the most interesting thing in the whole segment.

All the money that we’re not spending on ad revenue is the money we’re going to give back to RAB Nation, and all the people that are going to help us push the beer.Colby Covington, Real American Beer, on Fox Business

That is the entire strategy in one sentence. There is no media budget being trimmed at the edges and no test-and-learn pilot running alongside a paid programme. The advertising money is the community money. “We don’t have a big parent company behind us, these billion dollar companies,” Covington added. “We’re just American owned, made in America.”

It is working at a pace that made Varney sit up. The brand started two years ago. Covington said it has now “sold over 10 million cans in two years” and is “doubling our sales in our key markets” every month, having reached more than thirty states, according to the figure Fox put on screen during the interview.

Every pound in a paid social budget is rent. You pay a platform to introduce you to people, many of whom already buy from you, and the introduction lasts exactly as long as the payment does. A community works the other way around: the ambassador you recruit stays recruited, the content they make keeps working, and the relationship sits with the brand rather than on someone else’s balance sheet.

We have made that argument at length in Stop Renting Your Audience, so we will not repeat it here. What is worth noticing is that Real American Beer did not need convincing. They are building this way from launch, with no legacy ad budget to defend and no internal argument to win about whether the community deserves a line item. Most brands only reach for community after a decade of rising acquisition costs has forced their hand. This one started there.