Performance Spotlight: How Instant Hydration Built a System for AI to Scale

When Instant Hydration launched in mid-2024, they weren't entering a quiet market. Electrolytes are one of the most competitive categories in consumer wellness. But Kevin Cooper, Founding Partner and VP of Paid Acquisition, saw what a lot of brands miss. A broad market doesn't require a narrow strategy. It requires a better one.

In under 18 months, Instant Hydration scaled into a major player with significant monthly Meta spend. The playbook wasn't complicated. But it was deliberate and it reveals something important about where marketing is headed.

The Growth Engine

From day one, Instant Hydration was built on Meta. "Meta's always been our number one channel," Cooper says. "When we created this brand, we knew we were going to keep that same blueprint going."

And that blueprint was about spending smarter. Instead of building campaigns around rigid audience targeting and forcing spend into specific demographics, Cooper took a different approach by diversifying the creators and letting the platform do the finding.

"We took a broader approach and diversified the creators we work with, and almost let Meta find new audiences for us based on the creators versus us trying to manually force spend to different demos," he explains.

The strategy leaned heavily into Partnership Ads, running creator content under both the brand handle and the creator's own handle, and the advantage is creative variety. A wider range of authentic creator voices gave Meta's delivery system more signals to work with, letting it find audiences the team wouldn't have thought to build manually.

But variety only works if each voice is saying the right thing. Rather than handing creators a standard script, Cooper's team uses AI to analyze a creator's own organic content and surface the themes their audience responds to most, then builds the brief around where that overlaps with their product. In one case, the analysis surfaced a health condition a creator posted about often, one that electrolytes can directly help. Reframing their partership content around it unlocked significant scale.

"Partnership ads really put gasoline on the fire," Cooper says.

Less Is More When You Design the Right System

What makes Instant Hydration's approach stand out isn't just that they use AI tools. It's how they've structured their entire operation to let those tools work.

Cooper runs broad-targeting Advantage+ audience and Advantage+ placements across every ad set, with the only manual lever being a lifecycle exclusion of existing customers. "We take a very hands-off approach to Meta," he says. "Instead of getting reliant on the technical side of Ads Manager, we diversified the creators we work with, which let us expand to different audiences organically."

It's a counterintuitive move for anyone trained to optimize every lever. But Cooper sees it as the natural evolution. He says his job isn't to out-click the machine. It's to design the overarching strategy, like the creator mix, the messaging framework, the brand positioning, and then let AI scale what works.

"Less is more in the approach we took to the technical side of campaign management," he says. The real competitive edge, in his view, comes from everything around the campaign like which creators represent the brand, what story they tell, and how authentically it connects.

Building Trust in the System

Cooper is candid that Instant Hydration didn't adopt everything on day one. "For the first six to eight months, we did not utilize a lot of them," he says. "We weren't anti-AI enhancements. We just didn't know if it was on brand with what we expected."

But where the data proved out, they leaned in. Audience and placement delivery now run fully automated. Where brand integrity was at stake, they held the line. With whitelisted creator ads in particular, Cooper keeps creative enhancements off so a creator's handle is never paired with an asset they didn't make. "That's the only manual way we intervene," he says. "We just want to make sure things stay on brand."

That distinction is the discipline: automate delivery, own the creative.

The Measurement Unlock

If creative and creators are the fuel, smarter optimization is the steering wheel. And for Instant Hydration, one tool changed the game: incremental attribution.

"One thing that's been a big unlock for us is incremental attribution," Cooper says. "We've been leaning into it pretty heavily for a lot of our scaling campaigns."

The results speak for themselves. By switching their ads from standard conversion campaigns to Meta's incremental attribution optimization, which shifts delivery toward users the platform predicts wouldn't have visited otherwise, the team saw roughly 35% more net-new site visits, a lift validated by their third-party MTA tool.

"We could have the exact same ads in a conversion campaign with 7-day click, 1-day view. We can have the exact same ads in incremental attribution. And we'll see about 35% higher net-new visits," Cooper says. "That tells me it's doing something different."

Even more compelling, the team discovered that creative they thought had "burned out" could be revived by running it through incremental attribution campaigns. "We found that by repurposing that content into incremental attribution campaigns, they can come back to life."

For Cooper, it reshaped how his team allocates resources, unlocking growth they didn't know was there.

From DTC to Retail With the Same Playbook

Instant Hydration's biggest test yet is already underway: a major push into retail that launched over the summer. Cooper's strategy is to take the same creator-led, AI-powered approach that built the DTC business and port it to a completely different channel.

"We're betting on creators and whitelisting to support our retail go-to-market launches," he says. "We have a perfect toolset that got us on the direct-to-consumer side, and we're porting it over to allocate spend to retail."

For Cooper, the logic is simple. If the system works, extend it. He's building something that works across channels, from DTC to retail, connecting creator strategy, platform tools, and business objectives into one integrated engine.

That integration is already paying off in an unexpected way. "Where we really see the signal get better is the fact that we're running on so many channels now," Cooper says. "It actually improves our Meta performance because there's more signals from these different channels coming in."

AI That Manages the Whole Business

When asked about his biggest bet for the second half, Cooper points to AI agents that manage campaigns based on how the whole business is performing, not just what's happening inside Ads Manager. 

"We have an agent that looks at a third-party tool and says, 'Right now your CAC is very low, the business is performing well,' and it just allocates budget to the best ad sets," he says. "We essentially have AI managing campaigns based on the overall performance of the business in real time."

It's the next step in how Cooper already thinks about his role, moving from day-to-day optimization to designing the strategy that AI executes. Creator relationships, brand narrative, measurement framework, cross-channel plans – that’s the work he’s focused on. Meta's AI tools handle the execution at scale.

"At Instant, we're not scared of AI," Cooper says. "We're eager for it to move faster."

The Takeaway

Instant Hydration's story isn't just about a brand that grew fast. It's about a team that decided early on where to spend their energy and where not to.

Cooper chose creators who genuinely align with the brand. He trusted the platform's AI to find audiences he wouldn't have targeted manually. He used measurement tools like incremental attribution to make smarter decisions, not just report on past ones. And he treats the business as a connected system, not a collection of isolated campaigns.

The thread through it all is that Cooper moved his team's value away from campaign mechanics and towards strategic decisions that differentiate the brand.