Liquid Death's secret to viral marketing: Hire comedians

0:05Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Modern Retail Podcast.

0:30the brand's very, shall I say, irreverent marketing strategy. It was a really fun conversation, so I wanted to share it with you all. That's what's coming next. Thanks for listening.

0:46Good to see you, man. Good to see you. How are you? Cheers. Doing well. Here, we'll show a little slide. There is Liquid Death right there. So let's start with you. What's your background? How did you end up at Liquid Death? Talk about your trajectory. Sure, yeah. I mean, after a misspent youth, I found myself in advertising. I think I've heard that story many times over. Right, yeah. I was fortunate. I wound up at Crispin in kind of its glory days. This is a marketing crew, right? I don't know if Crispin is still resident. I don't even know if there's still an agency. I don't know that, but I do know the name.

1:17Yeah, you know, one of my first projects was Domino's Pizza Tracker. I was always on interactive and digital and social stuff. So in the early and mid-2000s, that was actually a great place to be. Turns out marketing got connected to a lot of the internet and that became maybe even more dominant than content in some ways. But yeah, I mean, wound up through a lot of acronyms, BBDO and Saatchi and Saatchi and all that kind of stuff. Popped out and continued a tech career. I was at Google for three years at a place called Creative Lab, which was like a startup incubator in the walls of Google. Had a few startups of my own and then wound up hitting liquid death about three years ago.

1:57Got it. And so I think most people know what Liquid Death is, but I think it's always good to give a general breadth of the company, especially what the focus over the last year has been. So can you just give a brief history? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, our founder and CEO, Mike, kind of had an insight that all the best, most fun, irreverent marketing happened for real unhealthy stuff. It was alcohol, junk food, that sort of thing. And he wondered what would happen if you take that approach, but then apply it to really healthy things. We started out still water, sparkling water followed. A few years later, we were flavored sparkling, kind of like a healthy soda, real low calorie.

2:34We use natural agave, not chemicals. And then last year we launched iced tea. The company in general, I think we're just about five years old. It's pretty young. You're new, but I feel like you have reached, I don't know if ubiquity is the right word, but like everyone knows who you are and you see it, you know, in a store, you know what you're getting. And I think that that's rare for a five-year-old brand. I think so. But our perspective is that it had to be this way. We were a startup with really limited funds. We needed viral packaging. I hate the word viral. It probably just means fast growing or attention getting or whatever.

3:06But we needed people to walk down the beverage aisle and see a thing and stop. What could it be called? How could it be designed that somebody had to stop, look at it, pick it up, maybe post it to social media for free. Similarly, with the content we put into the world, we have super small budgets relative to anybody really in our space, a lot of the major players for sure. So what idea can we put out there that press has to write about it, that people absolutely share it with their friends? And it's not a new approach. I mean, Red Bull and Monster have been doing entertainment first marketing since their origin.

3:41Their lane is action sports. We've just picked a different lane in comedy. Would you say the evolution of marketing or the marketing has evolved? Or like, it seems like Liquid Death has always been about splashy, funny, you know, having something that's very shareable and that people know what it is. How has that changed over the last five years as it's become more well known? Well, that's certainly the tip of the spear. I mean, my thesis is the information ecosystem is so fractured. You cannot buy your way into people's minds any longer. You know, everybody really hates marketing. You know, I think within every agency I was in, I felt like, you know, the man with the one eye in the land of the blind.

4:23They're like, this is amazing. This is hilarious. I go, no. But you've monopolized that commercial break and you force people to watch it. And, you know, you say drink more Ovaltine enough, eventually people go buy it. Right. But that's no longer the case. You know, if the content you have out there in the feed isn't worth watching really in the first 400 milliseconds, first couple seconds. It's a flick away. You know, it's a skip after five, even if you're paying for it on YouTube. And by the way, traditional broadcast has its moments. But look around the room. People are on their phones. So unless you're doing something and it need not be comedy, that's our world.

4:57You know, it could be earnest or education or, you know, like Monster and Red Bull. It could be action sports. Unless it's at a bar of true entertainment that people are worth paying for, you know, Whether it's a subscription, a share, a click, that sort of stuff, I think it's really difficult to break through. Where did the idea come from that it needed to be comedy? Well, look, I think the thing peeling the curtain of Liquid Death back a little bit, somebody might have the perception that we think we're badass and hardcore. No, it's all a joke. We look like a beer. That's a joke. It's funny.

5:34It's funny to see a kid drinking water. and it's also pretty awesome, I would imagine, as a parent, that your kid doesn't want the high fructose corn syrup and Monster Energy and all that sort of stuff. They're asking for something healthy. It's just been really a core of who we are, and it touches everything. Emails, SMS, abandoned cart. We had somebody screen cap that, and it had its little moment on LinkedIn a month ago because it was a funny little... We pretended the intern was locked in the basement and really concerned about somebody that was just engaging and then just went away and disappeared and you know do we need to send out a search committee kind of thing this is the question i always ask people in your position because comedy is hard um and i don't think comedy is or yeah i don't think comedy is scalable and i also think it's really easy to veer towards cringe when you are trying to be funny i think liquid death is very successful in its comedy and that's rare so congratulations on that but like how do you do that well number one we respect the bar like it It is a really high bar to elicit an involuntary reaction, which is laughter.

6:37There's no doubt about that. And I think, you know, we're entirely in-house from concept through to production, a really small team. And we look to places that do comedy well, you know, movies, TV, SNL is kind of an inspiration. And you just copy what they do. There is a process to get to comedy. So here's what it is. Hire people who do it. we don't have like people with traditional kind of marketing backgrounds in the creative group it's people that are adult swim writers and wrote for movies and wrote for the onion how do they work we set up a writer's room guess what they're not doing filling out time sheets and looking at some kind of job board to figure out their next task you know we cater to people with that mind we have a comic ambassador team that i you know helped us start a few years back i grew up in a comedy club mom has run one for 30 plus years at this point yeah yeah yeah so it's a team of you know headliner comics we're about 12 right now national touring headliner comics and we toss scripts to them for punch-up we ask them for flavor names when we're naming a thing so it's like you go to real funny people and then you can get the comedy and then i'd also say you know the reason we all love comedy, there's tons of different flavors, is that it isn't safe.

7:59It does provoke us. It does challenge the way we think a little bit. And when you're dealing with the internet, you know, that political concept of the Overton window, like the acceptable discourse, it's shifted. You know, if you're trying to be the funniest thing in somebody's feed and you see what's before or after, yeah, I mean, that stuff doesn't go through standards and practices the the way a 30 did back in the day. So you can be a little more, I really hate the word edgy, but that's kind of sometimes the way people think of it. Yeah. And so it seems like the way that people think about comedy and marketing is that it's for earned media and it's for organic sharing, all that.

8:36Is that the only level you're pulling? Or how would you describe the organic strategy at Liquid Death? Is this your beacon that you're following? Well, we've had this kind a great virtuous cycle where you put out actually wild attention, getting funny stuff, and then you get more followers on social media. And then the next time you do it, it goes to a bigger audience and the press begets press. And now all of a sudden they're kind of like calling us going, what are you dropping this month? We drop at least one this year. It's more like two kind of major moment campaign type things a month, like a metronome.

9:09So there's a little bit of this expectation that, okay, you're, we're not oversaturating, but I do think, you know, People have a good bit of amnesia. So if you do something once every two weeks, probably not too much or doesn't saturate press. Well, then this thing kind of builds up and it takes on a touch of a life of its own. But we also have a great body of work. And so we test that in ad expected environments. Throw our idea out there on social for free to our audience. Look at the metrics that matter. For us, the most important things. Are people sharing it? Are they saving it? Like these are really high bars, you know, likes and comments and engagement.

9:47That's cool, too. We've got our little algorithm that tells us how things are doing. And then if it does really well, we might put a little boost behind it. And I mean, like teeny tiny. And that's just to break through the gatekeepers of the algorithm. It's tough, especially as a brand, to get the organic reach often you deserve by the metrics. That does well. We see it still perform in these new audiences outside of our fans and followers. We can elevate it to a real ad expected environment like YouTube pre-roll. Do people skip in five or are we getting through view near 90 % sometimes? Oh, that's awesome.

10:23You went there to go see whatever content you wanted. We intercepted that compelling enough to do it. And increasingly now we're experimenting and putting real dollars behind connected TV. Really? Because we're absolutely standing out behind the glass when there's the insurance commercial and then the full-size truck, and we're in the middle of it with something that you can't believe went through your TV, we're seeing great results there too. Can you talk, so you mentioned the moments, the bigger campaigns. Can you give an example of one? Do you have a rubric for what works that will actually resonate with the customers?

11:00Yeah, I mean, we always look for creative tension. Liquid Death, Heavy Metal Expected. Liquid Death, Elf Cosmetics. probably not yeah we you know view partnerships whether it's with a celeb or a different brand increasingly there's a lot of brands in the inbox saying hey it'd be fun to do a collab you know we look at it like we're bringing this into the liquid death universe and there's only usually one right answer for what would liquid death and cosmetics do yeah and so yeah i mean that campaign was kind of funny it operated in a lot of different dimensions there was the content that we put out, which we love to play with advertising tropes.

11:39We're kind of making this real meta critique of marketing over a pretty long time scale. We kind of think of it almost like an art project. So, OK, cosmetics like that 80s, 90s caboodles kind of fun vibe. But what if instead of, you know, teeny bop icon, it was like, you know, this genre, this black metal, this Norwegian black metal kind of person as the heartthrob. And the makeup trend is, you know, corpse paint, which is a style. It was like maybe popularized by Kiss in the 70s, but it's kind of gone on to have its own life in a real niche way in metal. So then we do that. We put that content out there.

12:22Everything we do is really real. That's another interesting thing when you scratch the surface of liquid death. We really did take Tony Hawk's blood, paint skateboards, and sell them. You know, Travis Barker, we, you know, we're rough on celebrities, which is part of the wink that we have, this honesty with the people that follow us. It's like everybody knows the celebrity holding the can of, you know, soda doesn't really drink. It doesn't really care. They're being paid. So we kind of lean into that as we are paying our celebrities. We make them do wild things. Martha Stewart chopping off hands and making candles.

12:58Travis Barker hawking luxury enema kits that you fill with liquid death. And we really had him sign it and we really sold it, all this kind of stuff. But yeah, it's a wild ride. I guess my question is, you have two things going for you, which is when you have a brand that people know and expect this out of, and also you have the sort of ability to take these risks that other brands might not have. Is this a liquid death? Is it just because you were able to present this from the beginning that you're able to do this and then have such success with organic? Or do you think that there are things that help it so that you're able to have these campaigns grow so well?

13:37Well, yeah. I actually forgot something that I usually say at the beginning of any talk. I like to give a disclaimer that the insights you're about to receive may or may not apply to your brand, right? This is, you know, we're a pretty unique voice, a pretty unique brand. I don't mean to sit here and say anything that I say is what you should be doing. I just want to say - So you're saying every brand shouldn't be making an Enema kit. Maybe not. I mean, there's probably a couple that could. This is just stuff that kind of works for us. But I say that because I think we have a number of advantages that allow this to work for us.

14:10We have a kind of CMO and CEO. You can only be as creatively risky, if maybe I'll say that, as the top decision maker. So we have somebody that will say, yeah, let's buy a jet. Let's do it. And we'll talk about that. I think, yeah, we have started this way from the beginning. I think for a lot of old brands, there's that Steve Bruschemi meme holding the skateboard, hello, fellow kids. I think if you kind of get in this world too quick or too soon, you know, it could be a dissonant note, so to speak. And then also we have a unique approach to the haters, right? We're an internet brand. Our goal is to win the internet.

14:55And that comes with it, right? There will always be trolls and haters out there. But instead of like deleting the post or apologizing or issuing PR, we fly them out to LA, we challenge them to a taste test, and we tase them. We take the hater comments, and we make a series of - You tase the haters. Yeah. Yeah, that was a little thing we did. I mean, we found people that said it was the worst water they've ever tried in their life, and so we reached out to a whole bunch. We only found two takers and said, yeah, we'll fly out to LA, and if you can do a blind taste test, and it is the worst water, as you say, we'll give you a grand.

15:28If not, we will tase you with a taser. And that was a fun email to write to legal.

15:36But, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, I think there's really deep-rooted human psychology, in-group, out-group psychology, right? It's our primordial caveman days. You know, the tribe over the hill is scary and, you know, protect yours. And what brands all lean into is, oh, here's the in-group. Let's define who we are. Let's sell merch. Here's the flag, all that kind of stuff. But what few do is define the out-group. Here's what we're not. and with the stuff we do around the haters and just kind of our general attitude it's like if if you take yourself too seriously if you're not in on the joke that's cool we're not for everybody we're okay with that so you mentioned the jet earlier can you just talk a little about because that's a new campaign and it's kind of a wild one yeah absolutely i mean the the origin story is a few years ago uh netflix kind of had their top documentary that they did of the year it was called Pepsi Where's My Jet?

16:28And it went back to a giveaway that Pepsi was up to in the 90s and all of what kind of transpired. And the conclusion is they didn't give away the jet and they were sued and all that kind of stuff. And so that dropped just before the holidays by my recollection a few years back. And CEO Mike was like, we're doing it. Get me a Harrier. Let's do it. This would be so cool if we could just drop this quickly. And I spent the better part of that holiday on the phone to England where a lot of these Harriers were in service over there and figuring out lawyers to get us through Department of Defense clearance.

17:04And like, how can we get a Harrier? Well, it turns out the ones that fly are like more than our annual marketing budget. So that wasn't going to happen. But there was something called a museum shell that we could get this basically just the shell of the plane. But it was still going to take minimum six months on the boat. We had to go through all manner of, you know, Department of Defense clearance because it was at one point weapons capable, huge complexities, and it was a bit of a non-starter. We just couldn't, we knew that if we were to go this route, it wasn't going to really be in the zeitgeist by the time this thing dropped.

17:38And we believe that, you know, a lot of creative ideas have a pretty short shelf life. You got to go quick. That's why we're all in-house. That's why we turn stuff around sometimes in weeks when the idea hits. but if it sticks maybe there's something to it so earlier this year and by earlier i mean march you know mike was again online and he found effectively a fighter jet it was two seat looked like you know kind of the old classic top gun jet and it was a much more reasonable price and he hit me up he's like let's do it let's give this one away and we that was basically the edict in March. And we were live with this campaign in mid-May.

18:21And it was five projects in one. It was all the FAA, all the regulation, getting a jet in escrow, painting the jet. We call it the dehydrator. Oh, it's not up on the screen, but... Yeah, it is. Just over there, yeah. Oh, yeah, there we go, the dehydrator. Because the liquid death logic, kind of in our weird, bizarre universe, it's like, well, we're giving this away because given the Gs that it pulls and the 500 plus mile an hour speed, it relieves you of all bodily fluids. So you then need to purchase more liquid death. You know, we play this character of an evil corporation, right? You know, but behind the scenes, it's just doing something better for you and better for the planet, right?

18:59So yeah, I mean, found the jet, painted the jet. Turns out it needs to get new flight certifications once you've painted the thing. It's hangered outside of Chicago. The shoot was ridiculous to get insurance to go, you know, pull G's and loop-de-loops on the plane. The mechanism for entry was, you know, for every liquid death can you buy, it's one entry. And you submit by just texting us a picture of your receipt, you know, figuring out, like, you know, really heavy OCR machine learning to make sure that it was all accurate. That was quite a problem. And then, you know, sustaining this, we've put some fun YouTubers and influencers up in it.

19:37We have about a 75 % puke ratio. So that's, you know, doesn't make the video. It's a little much. And then posting bonds in the states to give this thing away, and it comes with six months of hangar space we had to negotiate, and years worth of liquid death in your own flight helmet, and we pay the sales tax on it to really, like, trust me, this is going to conclude just after Labor Day. And there's a cash prize, of course, because again, not everyone can really have the jet. But I really want them to pick the jet. We're doing everything possible because it makes for a much better story. So what is, like, I know you're a nontraditional marketing company, but how do you talk ROI with something like that?

20:19Well, this one's super easy to figure out. Well, this launched and it had a ton of press, like a lot of our big things. But it really caught wind in the most beautiful way at the local market level. Like, it was every radio jocks, like, have you heard this wacky thing that this liquid death? I've never heard of liquid death. And they almost sell the brand for us in their own voice, which is what we always want to happen. Podcast reads influencers. There's like two bullet points. We're healthy. We're good for you. We're good for the planet. Go. And then local morning TV. So in all these major markets, it was going.

20:55So our metrics on the media were fantastic. But now we have this giveaway program that we're incentivizing people to buy Liquid Death throughout the summer, our biggest seasonality period. You know, beverages sell better when it's hot outside. And, you know, summer is when people are most thirsty. And then we're getting the receipts back. We're getting the receipt data. We're getting this amazing data of, like, what are people buying with liquid death? Challenging some assumptions of usage. Where are they buying it? You know, how much are they buying? And so, like, this was a direct line to ROI.

21:25We know exactly what we've sold. And we can understand some incrementality around it. And it's been wonderful. Yeah, I would wonder who would actually want to have a jet, but it seems like people wanted to participate and do this. Who would want to have a free jet with six months of hangar space and we're covering? Like, there's a lot of wild people. Yes, that's true. And by the way, you know, it's a two-seater, so you hire a pilot. Turns out they're not as expensive as I thought they would have been. Okay. And, you know, rip around for a month or two and then, you know, sell the thing. Who knows?

21:55All right, all right. One thing that you sort of mentioned earlier on, and it goes into this campaign, but it also goes into the other strategies. usually marketing teams have a brand team and then they have a performance team and they can combat with each other and it's hard. But it seems like your brand and your organic informs all of the paid and performance that you do. How do you make that work? And are they two different teams? Do they work together? How does it all work in tandem? That's been a massive evolution for us this year as to really leaning into, I guess, what people would traditionally call performance.

22:28But I do think in the chicken or egg debate, there is a starting point. And I do think it's brand and content. You know, the old notion of, well, I know this person is in five miles from the, you know, hello, it's 102 in Dallas today by liquid death banner ad doesn't work. But if you can weave that into content that we know is sticky that people will share, like the audio starts and we throw up that big fat liquid death skew that's on BOGO at Harris Teeter, and we know the person is there, and then we just quickly get them into the content. We conclude with that. We're seeing tremendous results.

23:08So we're not at all shy to get into performance. In fact, we do quite a lot of it, but we just think it has to be content-led. Got it. And so are the people who are in your performance team performance marketer? Is that difficult for them to understand it being content-led, I guess, in a sense? No. I mean, the Liquid Death staff, first off, I can't underscore how small the marketing team is. This is a hive mind, which is a superpower. We don't have a brand book. We don't need one. We all know kind of what this is. We've had virtually no attrition from the early days, so everyone knows the history of it.

23:42and we attract a bit of you know the pirates of the industry people from absolutely non-traditional backgrounds and you know the person who's leading performance right now built and sold his own media company and is you know like beyond a guru and you know had invested in liquid death earlier and is deeply in love with the brand and so you know we're all in it to win it got it i'm gonna pause does anyone in the audience have any questions raise your hand if you do yes right there there's that microphone coming to you. Hi there. Yeah. Huge fan of liquid death. I from Dr. Squatch. So, you know, kind of similar, a similar deal in terms of a branding, but I'm curious around roadmapping for you guys in terms of like, when you are sort of thinking about your calendar year, are you guys like, I know you mentioned like shelf life of creative is, is of creative ideas is quite short.

24:33Are you guys thinking like, in terms of like strategically when you're like planning out a creative campaign or is it mostly like, okay, the best ideas, let's just get them on the table as quickly as possible. Like curious, like sort of like you're thinking with campaigns and objectives. If you talk to me two years ago, I would say, hey, we're just kind of this always on opportunistic. It comes, we make it. We know we have a couple things that might be in the future because of a contract with a celeb or something. Now we're planning into 2026. So we definitely understand we have these moments of seasonality like the summer and we need to kind of continue and prime awareness beforehand.