Lightning in a Can: Liquid Death’s Killer Creative

0:00For us, what drives that creativity is two things. Is it unexpected? And is it funny? I love your creative mantra. What's the dumbest thing we could possibly do? Usually what is unexpected and funny is the dumbest thing that you can think of. And when we started Liquid Death, our mantra was, how can we win the internet for a day? And so that's how we came up with some crazy shit. And people see it and people remember it.

0:25I'm here poolside at the Cannes Advertising Festival. And if there's one brand I've been desperate to decode, it's Liquid Death. But what looks like pure madness from the outside actually has a very deliberate system in the chaos underneath it. And that's what I want to unpack today with Liquid Death's Chief Media and Digital Commerce Officer, Benoit Vatter. What's working, what isn't, and what the rest of us can learn from how they do it. Let's get into it. Here's my refreshingly candid conversation with Benoit.

0:58Good morning, Benoit. How are you doing? Good. Good morning, Josh. We are on the rooftop at Cannes. We're having a very Cannes moment already. I'm glad it's like 8 a.m. because it's going to get hot as anything. Cheers. Cheers. Here's to Liquid Death. Thank you for being on the pod. Welcome to Frontier CMO. Thank you. I'm going to try, this is a Liquid Death strawberry. And I have orange. Okay, honestly, that is better than I thought it was going to be. So kudos. I'm glad. That's quite nice. Yeah. Yeah, that's on you one. And I think people like it. You're meeting with a lot of your retail partners.

1:29Yeah. So Walmart's here. Now they have a media business as well. Are most of these brands here through the lens of their media business? They are. They are through their media business. It's big. It's growing fast for all of them. Right. They're, you know, all those retailers are selling in store, but digital penetration that they call selling through that.com is getting really big, which is obviously growth happens through media. So they have a massive media business and their media business are here. Okay. Right. What does that mean for someone who sells products into those stores? And there's always been a suspicion that you sort of, you know, throw us some media dollars and we'll give you more shelf space.

2:02Is that actually true? It used to be that. It's not that anymore. Okay. You gain shelf space by selling product, not by spending dollars. Now, does that help their margin? Yes. But actually, it's growing right now because it's efficient. Like, as I spend dollars, that helps me to drive sales. And their products are getting a lot more mature. The tech is getting really good. So it helps us grow. Okay. That's a good thing. So talking about growth, you're a challenger brand, Liquid Death. You established in 2019. One of the talking stories of the marketing industry for the last five years has been what you have done with creativity.

2:36It's what you've done to really break through and grow this brand. I love the phrase that your sort of creative mantra is like, what's the dumbest thing we could possibly do? I was just wondering, could you explain for the audience, what does that mean? What is the dumbest thing you could possibly do is your driving force? For us, what drives that creativity is two things. Is it unexpected? And is it funny? And usually what is unexpected and funny is the dumbest thing that you can think of, right? And also you're living in this world of social media where people are scrolling all the time. You need to stand out.

3:09And when we started Liquid Death, Mike, our CEO, his mantra was, how can we win the internet for a day? So when we were in the room thinking about what we can come up as an idea, is that how, as we show that, because we are born through social media, how can we drop something that everybody is going to talk about for the day? And so through those different lands, that's how we came up with some crazy shit. And people see it and people remember it. So for the non-Americans in the audience, let me say my favorite thing that you did. And it was a small thing, but I laughed my ass off, right? And then I want to hear a couple of your favorites.

3:45So my favorite thing was someone posted on, I think it was Twitter, and basically said, regarding liquid death, I would rather lick the sweat off a man or worse that effect than a drink of liquid death. And so you guys arranged for a, I'll say, you know, rotund gentleman to go in the gym and then have someone lick the sweat off his back. And it was funny as F. We did. We did. That was a good one. He got a lot of attention. He got a lot of virality. That's an example. How can we marry the water with something funny, dumb that people will remember that was one. We did a lot of crazy stuff. Since we are this challenging brand, I love to go after the big guys.

4:24About a year ago, our biggest competitor in T is Arizona. And we're like, how can we really bother them? And we found this little town in Nebraska called Arizona and we reached out to them and we became their official sponsor. So now we run a campaign about being the official sponsor of Arizona. And that was fun because we showed up in this like 500 people town in Nebraska and started recording crazy stuff with like chainsaw cutting cans. I mean, he was crazy and he did the trick. People really remembered it. And that was a lot of fun to do. So it feels like you have the dream brief. Just do epic shit.

4:59Exactly. Do epic, epic stuff. We do not have briefs. We do not write briefs. But that's what it is. That's exactly what it is. Explain the creative process. Because let me just give the context here. Through my entire career as a marketer, I've worked with many hundreds of brands and we all believe that we're creative. But somehow the system, the process of bureaucracy prevents us from taking big swings. And here you are, Liquid Death, big swing after big swing after big swing. We all want that, but you make it happen. So yeah, help the audience understand. How do you make these big swings happen?

5:30What are the different elements? What is the process inside of Liquid Death? Yeah, so that's a very interesting process. Comes from Mike, obviously, is the brain behind that brain. Mike Sayo, the CEO and founder, is a creative genius. His thought is, marketers are the least creative people on earth. So we should not have marketers doing creatives. You start with that. Then for us, we pick Arlen, which was being funny. Comedy. Comedy is very difficult to do. But for him, the perfect setup was when you look at SNL skits. And the setup for us is exactly the same. We have a boardroom in LA, in our HQ, where we show up on every Thursday for four hours.

6:10No phones, just a room with him, with me, with the creative team. but the creative team is made of producers and made of comedians. There are no marketers. There are no agencies. There is nobody besides us. And that's how we create. And it creates by coming up with ideas. It's like a writer's room. We're just like throwing ideas, look at ideas that we came up with like three months ago, see if they may be relevant now, and we start going at it. And that's how we create. There is no brief. There is no agency involved. I have so many thoughts and directions I want to take this, but let's just ask, One of the great advantages of agencies is an outside-in perspective.

6:46You're in this room, you're getting your pitches, you're doing for four hours every Thursday. How do you keep it fresh? How do you keep it engaging? How do you actually make sure you're not just inside your own bubble laughing at your own jokes? That's very true, and that's a problem, though. I was talking actually about that with Mike like a couple weeks ago, because the idea may be funny when we talk about it, but then when you record it, when you shoot it with the cameras on, it's not that funny, but we think it's funny. So the big thing is obviously to show it to the rest of the world to see if it's funny.

7:12But it's also to have people that have been really good at producing funny content before. Because again, being funny is very difficult. It's not just the script, but it's the execution with the camera. So we try to bring people that are really good at this as well, that are true comedy producers. Right. So you pitch these ideas. You're in the room. Someone comes in with an idea. And I'm just going to make something up. Yeah. Okay. I'm sitting here. We're going to get a donkey and we're going to airlift it onto the Art de Triomphe in Paris for some reason to go with the new flavor of liquid death water, right?

7:43Now, is that a funny idea? And where does the funny become like destructive and just like, we can't go there or that's not good? So there is nothing that we cannot go to besides politics and religion. We don't want to touch that. We're also being very thoughtful about the product. So it's not being funny for the sake of being funny. It needs to be able to carry the product and the brand to get the awareness, not about what is this crazy brand, but to get awareness about this is a crazy brand with a really good product, and this product is tea or this product is energy. So when the idea comes up, we challenge this idea with all of that, right?

8:19It was like, hey, what kind of RTBs for the product does it carry? What is the audience gonna think? What is the audience for this product? And is the audience gonna react to this? Is it relevant to a cultural moment? Is it gonna be able to create something funny within the first three seconds because we're living in this world, If you're not funny within the first three seconds, it's never going to happen. So if you have to wait 30 seconds to start seeing the donkey on the top of the Arc de Triomphe, it's probably not going to work, right? So there's all those things that, all those filters that we go through from a product standpoint, but also from where the content is going to be and be able to catch its attention to go back to, are we going to win the internet for the day or not?

8:55Super fascinating. Has there been an idea in the last six months that got pitched which just crossed the line and you thought we can't do that? Not because of religion or politics, just because there was something about which didn't quite work. And you can talk to that. I can talk about one, but the challenging part for us is we get bigger, where it's very difficult to do what we want to do on the big stage. And the biggest stage that is for creativity and ads is the Super Bowl. We did the last two Super Bowls. And our last ad during the Super Bowl was about our energy drink. It was about cutting people's head.

9:24Because energy drinks those days are so much caffeine that it just cuts you in half. So we are making fun of this. But now to get in front of the NFL, to explain that concept and to get them to agree to air that during the Super Bowl was extremely challenging. So this is the ad where the heads exploded? Yeah, it exploded. Yeah, just to be clear that people drank bad energy drinks and their heads exploded. Yeah, because too much caffeine. And the NFL is like, we want to see the final spot. It's like, we cannot show you the final spot because if we spend, I don't know, a lot of money to create and then you say no.

9:53So how do we show boards to explain that we're going to explode ads? people are going to have head cut off during the Super Bowl. That was extremely challenging. So we had to back off on a lot of things. And in order to get it approved and to be able to be on the main stage. Yeah. Fake violence, no. Real violence on the field, all good. Yes, you say it. You've done a lot of interesting partnerships. So tell me about Elf Beauty and some of these other ones. And what's the connection to the product there? Yeah, so for us, it's the audience. The connection is the audience and the other connection is the unexpected.

10:25Would you expect Liquid Death to be with the beauty products for teenagers. No. That's good. That's a win right there. Then obviously the other one is the audience. The audience are the moms and the kids are an audience that we need to get in front of, that we were not in front of. Partnering with them, now you get in front of them. So that's a perfect partnership. Anytime we think about a partnership, we think about audience extension. So just explain what you did with Elf Beauty because it was pretty fascinating. The last one that we did, we did lip balm in the flavors of the different liquid death water that we have.

10:54Right. And so those lip balms look like a liquid death can. sold on their website, sold at the retailers. And sold out, right? And sold out. We sold it out, I think, in six minutes. Yeah. It was crazy. And it's amazing because, again, it goes back to what I was talking about earlier. We won the internet, like for the day. So you said the phrase several times, win the internet for the day. So let me give you a hypothetical scenario. You've got your big idea. You've got your big thing to win the internet for the day. And it just, it flops, right? Yeah. Does that mean you need to bring up your next one much quicker?

11:23Like, what is the cycle for doing this? You're not doing a daily one, right? No, we're not doing a daily one right now. We're probably putting campaigns, I would say, every six weeks, eight weeks. But that means if something doesn't work, you're now 16 weeks between having your cultural moment. So does that happen? It does happen. And some also are not always designed to win the internet for the day. Some are designed to work really well with media so we can get in front of people through media dollars. Okay. Because there's a problem with virality. We haven't touched on that yet. But we're at the stage where we went so viral over and over and over that we get the virality who you get in front of is dictated by the algorithm.

11:58And most of the time it's in front of the same people over and over. So yes, it's 10 million, 15 million, big virality, but it's the same 15 million, same 20 million compared to the 350 million that we need to get in front of. So we need to be able to create content that carries the brand that we can put media dollars behind in order to get in front of the people that we want to. So there is those two buckets that we play with. Some campaigns are designed for virality. some campaigns are designed really for the product and to get in front of the people that we want to get in front of. Now, to answer your question about what happens if he flops, well, he does flop sometimes.

12:29It means for us, flopping is probably good for others, right, but it's still not the level of virality that we would expect. Usually we bring media behind it in order to amplify the way we wanted to amplify it. But that still sends a signal to us around something was not right in the creative or something was wrong in terms of getting the attention in terms of winning for the day. So that gets the creative team to get more feedback for the next one. What did we learn? And sometimes it's not even the creative. It's like, what was the thumbnail, right? Maybe people just didn't click on it or the first two seconds were not right.

13:02Like we start looking at this data. So we are very data driven, by the way. We test a lot of things. We look at a lot of data to understand what works, what doesn't work. That makes sense. Thing that Liquid Death has done, which seems so impressive from the outside, is you have translated engagement, cultural cachet into sales. Yeah. Right. And I guess the rest of us still think about, you know, awareness, consideration, intent. We think about the full funnel. You somehow have jumped straight from cool stuff happens here, sales happen here. How are you actually working the system underneath to actually make the funnel work for you or break the funnel the way you've done so?

13:38Compared to any challenging brand, we started with the top of the funnel. We started with the awareness. A lot of people that are talking full funnel are the people that have been established for 20 years. that have massive already audience and they are thinking how to put that funnel together. As an emerging brand, usually you start thinking conversion first. You need sales, you need sales. For us, we started to think awareness first. So we built massive awareness, which was then a lot easier as a challenging brand to bring down the funnel. But we think about the funnel. I think about the funnel every single day.

14:07When people are telling me the funnel has collapsed, the funnel doesn't exist anymore, I call bullshit on this. This is not true. And we do it through tech. So my background is tech. I think we may talk about this at some point, but I have an ad tech background. So I think about the audience and I think about the audience that get captured by winning the internet for the day. How do I retarget them down the funnel? How do I get them? I talked about earlier, I'm going to meet with Walmart. I'm going to meet with Target. How do I talk to those folks that they can get my audience, I can push through pipes, my audience.

14:37So when they show up on their website, I can show them liquid death. So then I can turn awareness into sales. The second thing is also because our brand was getting a lot of awareness. The retailers wants us on the shelf. And there is nothing better than shelf presence. When you're on the shelf, people see you. And then that turns into sales. So when you have massive awareness and you're on the shelf, suddenly the funnels start to exist. And because the brand was so powerful out there, the retailers wanted us on the shelf. Having a cool thing is people want cool things themselves. Correct. The awareness was more important first, and then the distribution?

15:13correct yes it was because you cannot get distribution without awareness so awareness was number one we needed to get known you've done some pretty interesting things so i must want to go under the hood for a second on liquid death so i was trying to work out because i'm trying to sort of you know back fit of how the company's been so successful right and over a billion dollar valuation and hundreds of millions of dollars of sales every every year at this point um you know for a four or five year old company this is pretty damn impressive you did some really interesting deals. So why don't you stack around?

15:42So here's my little analysis, right? There is the top of the funnel, high awareness, the stunts and the amazing creativity that you've, we've already thought about, right? Second, you did an exclusive deal with Live Nation where you got, you gave Live Nation equity, not just money. You get equity in the whole company. They made you the exclusive partner. So that's the second one. Third one, I saw you got Sean White, the snowboarder, you've got Wiz Khalifa, you've got Neil Brennan, the comedian, you've got rock bands and heavy metal bands, all with equity in the company. So these sort of non-traditional partnerships and you're a health food company, you know, and you have sustainable, no plastic bottles.

16:21It's all canned. So I was trying to work out what is the balance between those three or four things in terms of actually being unlocked for the business? Yeah, that's a good one. I think the big unlock for us in the early days, I think it depends on that what stage we're at. The first big unlock was really definitely Live Nation because Live Nation got off cans at every single festivals and venues. And so now people were starting drinking and carrying the can everywhere during those concerts and taking pictures. And it was finding itself on social and people were drinking. It's like, what is this?

16:53Right. People expecting beer. They're drinking. It's water. It makes people talk a lot. That was a big thing. And people were remembering the brand attached to moment, right? It was a concert. It was a memory. And that was extremely, extremely strong. So for us, that was a big moment. And definitely, I would say number one, probably as we started to scale. The second one, definitely our partnership with the celebrities was big because when you bring them with equity like that, they have a vested interest and you don't have to ask them to create content. They will create content when they want to create content.

17:26You bring Wes Khalifa, like He's always carrying a can anywhere. Tony Hawk, the same. So now you're starting to have true, authentic, creator, celebrity content, rather than bringing a celebrity, again, putting a creative riff in front of them, trying to get a 30 seconds, and nobody really cares, right? So for us, that was another very, very important piece of the puzzle as we started to get going. And then mom's a bonus product because it's healthy. And you still claim to this day, you're a health food health product right that's that's the platform it's an healthy beverage like that's always what we do when we create a beverage liquid death has gone its own way he's done different things challenge a brand it's a new brand are there some lessons here in terms of what you've been doing in these partnerships in these creative relationships in getting people on your side that other brands can learn from too as well yeah i think for us is not be afraid of doing something that you don't want to do i think that carries a lot of weight across all the partnership.

18:26And I think also is what I've been impressed by the creative team and what we've done is stick with your lane. Don't adjust based on the feedback that you have out there. Mike is really good at pointing out always this 99-1 rule, meaning like if you pay attention to the one person that comments on social media, you do it wrong. Because that one percent is not the 99 % that consume the content and understand the brand. And a lot of brands pay attention to the 1%. I completely understand what you're saying. Yeah, I agree with you. Let's just go back because you said something earlier which sort of tickled my brain.

19:03You don't have a brief, you don't do briefs. So this is sacrilege inside of the welcoming community. We're here at Cannes where it's all about the briefs. So how do you not have a brief ever? We don't have a brief saying, hey, we have this idea, we should go to promote tea and we should think about doing that in the south of France. We don't do that because we think that limits creativity. Again, brief is made by marketers who are the least creative person on planet Earth. So that's why we don't want that. That's why the ideas have to come from the comedians. And the comedians don't do briefs.

19:35If you put a brief in front of a comedian, it's going to be like, what are you talking about? So that's why for us, it makes no sense to have a brief. It's going to not getting to where we want to be in terms of, you know, the output. So a lot of challenges for brands we've experienced as ourselves is seeding control of your brand into the creative community, into out there, right? You want to have tight control of your brand. And actually that doesn't seem to be the way the world works nowadays, but we produce brand guidelines. We produce things which basically help our creators and partners know who we're about.

20:05Do you do the same as well? No, we don't have brand guidelines. We don't have a brand book. Okay, so you have no brand guidelines, no brand book. We don't have a brand book. We don't have brand guidelines. And our partners all the time are asking us, can we get your brand guidelines, your brand was like, no, we don't have one. If you want us to do something, we will create it. So you don't need to do it. And by the way, the team that has been created has been the same team for the last five years, right? So if a partner wants to leverage us, oh, we'll give you our logos, but we won't let you touch the brand we will create.

20:35Now, if you want to use our name, you can use our name, but we won't co-post with you. We won't be part of this. You will just do what you want to do, but we won't be associated with it. Same with creators. if we let creators create content, it's not on our profile. It's not on our handle. You do whatever you want. Like we let you do whatever you want because that's how authenticity really happens. By letting them do whatever we want to do. Now, if it's our content on our handle, on our spots on TV, now we control the whole thing. And we don't have an agency doing it. It's all internally. You do everything internal, right?

21:09Everything. I'm kind of interested in what you hire people, right? You hire people all the time. You're not pulling from marketing organizations. I would imagine you would find marketers who had careers being compliant and sort of brand safe harder to work with. Is that true? No. On the creative side, we don't bring any of those people. Like I said, again, it's mostly comedians or producers. So people that produce not only, you know, comedy, but produce a lot of different things, a lot of different verticals. Now on the other side of my team, which is the media team, yeah, we bring industry people, people that have a lot of experience buying media.

21:45But again, on the media side, I'm not using any agencies as well. I'm like doing it all internally. Okay. What's the number one thing you look for in an interview? And just for everyone who wants to join Liquid Death, what do they need to know right now? They're interviewing with you. What do you look for? For me, it's the startup mentality. Like we need that stuff. Like the red tape, the slow, the process, the like, uh-uh. Like I need someone that can just be in there, that can be strategic, but it can be in the weeds at the same time. I don't want managers that push paper. I need people that can be thinking and can do.