Tenzing founder Huib van Bockel on leaving Red Bull to build a natural energy drink challenger

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This is a founder interview about a natural energy drink. Huib van Bockel, ex-Red Bull, built Tenzing into what he calls the UK's #3 energy brand behind Red Bull and Monster. For an ad-tech or media operator, the useful content is a single line item: one broad, emotional out-of-home message outran the targeted digital creative and kept running for months on its own merit. Everything else is CPG brand-building with no platform, programmatic, identity, or measurement hook.

Reversibility is not really in play. Nothing here forces an operator to act. The question is whether there is one transferable idea worth the read, or whether you should skip it. I'll keep the council short, because the material is thin, and I'll say plainly where it lands.

The Skeptic. Strip the romance and what's left is a founder talking his own book. The 91% "same or more energy, no crash" stat has no sample size, no method, no independent source. The "#3 in the UK by value rate of sale" and "energy overtook cola at £3 billion" numbers are self-reported and unverified. Van Bockel even dismisses Celsius to claim he was "first to source energy purely from nature," which is exactly the kind of primacy claim a fundraising founder makes. For an ad-tech reader, none of this is evidence of anything. It's a well-run brand story. In plain terms: interesting founder, zero data you'd stake a media plan on.

The Operator. There is one thing here that survives contact with a real Tuesday. Tenzing's "It's 2026, it's time for good energy" ran on the London Underground in January and the digital team kept it live through June because it was the best-performing ad in market. That's a broad-reach brand line beating the targeted digital creative on the same brand's own dashboard. If you run performance for a publisher or agency, you've seen this: the emotional 6-second hook keeps outperforming the fifteen finely-sliced audience variants, and the team quietly leaves it up. For a non-specialist: the simple billboard-style message worked better than the clever data-driven one, so they stopped fighting it.

The Customer / End User. The advertiser here is a challenger CPG brand, and their behavior is the tell for media sellers. Tenzing built distribution through bouldering walls, universities, and tech offices, then reached for out-of-home when they wanted scale. Programmatic and identity-based targeting are not in the story at all. That's the uncomfortable read for anyone selling addressable inventory to emerging brands: at the awareness stage, these buyers reach for reach, not for precision. In plain terms: the growth-stage advertiser wanted to be seen widely, and paid for broad placement, not for a perfectly targeted segment.

The CFO. The economics angle is thin, but there's a real one. A single out-of-home creative that keeps winning for six months is cheap. You paid to make it once and it earned its keep across two quarters. Compare that to the cost of a targeting-heavy digital program that needs constant creative refresh and audience tuning to hold performance. The lesson operators already half-know: for a challenger brand, the payback on one durable brand message can beat the payback on an elaborate addressable setup. That's not a reason to short data-driven media. It's a reminder that reach still has attractive unit economics at the top of the funnel.

The tensions. The only real disagreement is between the Operator and the Customer on one side, who see a genuine transferable point, and the Skeptic on the other, who says none of it is measured well enough to trust. Both are right. The out-of-home-beats-targeting observation is real inside Tenzing's own numbers, and it's also an anecdote of one, from a founder with every incentive to tell a clean story. The second tension is what it means for addressable sellers: is the reach-over-precision pattern a stage-of-growth quirk, or a standing preference among challenger brands? The episode can't tell you.

Synthesis. For an ad-tech operator, impact is low and indirect, and I'll say it straight: you can skip this episode. The one idea worth carrying out is not new. Broad, emotionally resonant creative can outperform and outlast targeted digital, and it does so cheaply, which is why growth-stage CPG brands keep spending on reach before they spend on precision. If you sell addressable inventory or measurement into emerging brands, that's a mild reminder about where these buyers actually are in their journey, not a strategy shift. Nothing here hinges on a fact you need to verify, because nothing here is going to move your roadmap.

No high-conviction prediction this week.

There's no ad-tech mechanism in this episode to make a falsifiable call on. It's a CPG brand story, and the one crossover idea is an anecdote from a founder's own dashboard. Forcing a prediction here would be exactly the low-conviction noise the scoreboard doesn't need.